Salzburg Global Fellows share their views during Session 613 -
A select number of Fellows at the Ending Pandemics - Finding Outbreaks faster program were asked: Who are the key stakeholders we need to work with to improve outbreak timeliness metrics? We have published their answers below.
"I think the obvious stakeholders here are the World Health Organization, as the UN agency for global health… who are supposed to be doing global governance for disease and the national level ministries of health. Ministries of health at the national level as well as the intermediate local public health officials. These are the folks you actually have to do the work, and therefore they're the ones who will be officially collecting data and therefore they're the ones we need to coordinate with if we want data collected in a certain way."
Rebecca Katz
Associate professor and director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University
"I think that national level epidemiologists who work with… responses to outbreaks would probably be [those] responsible to implement that in the country level, and then [that] cascade[s] to regional and local [levels], and of course, you also need some political support."
Vladimir Mikikj
Epidemiologist at the Institute of Public Health of Macedonia
"I think each group has [its] importance. Community groups are important, stakeholders are important, [and] health workers are important because ending outbreaks requires the involvement of each other... The most important thing is to reduce timelines of the metrics."
Aïcha-Marceline Sarr
Project manager for Senegal and West Africa Projects at Foundation Merieux
"I would say the key stakeholders would be public health authorities at multiple geographic levels, so at the local, regional, country and international level. But then there is an important stakeholder that is our communities who may identify, help to report, [and] seek clinical care. So, those also are key stakeholders for these timeliness metrics. Then within those infrastructures, you have not only the clinician and healthcare workers, but you have epidemiologists and public health [officials]. Then you have technologists who are really important as we think about advancing our ability to find dates and find notifications, and so being able to comb and curate that data from systems so we can more efficiently and practically employ these metrics."
Amy Kirchner
Co-director of the Collaboratory of the University of Minnesota and director of the Food Protection and Defense Institute
"You need the people from the front line up. I really like the saying 'Nothing about us without us,' and that goes down to community level of citizens, but it also talks about frontline workers. You're never going to get anything in a system to work unless people who are all the way through the system have buy-in, and part of the way to have buy-in is to have ownership, and part of the way to have [that] is to have a say in what the thing is about. If you want something to be sustainable, you've got to have ownership."
Melinda Moore
Senior physician policy researcher at RAND Corporation
The program Finding Outbreaks Faster: How Do We Measure Progress? is being held in partnership with Ending Pandemics and the University of Minnesota. To keep up to date with the conversations taking place during the program, please follow #SGShealth on Twitter and Instagram.