Esteemed Member State Representatives – especially from the Member States that have volunteered to undergo the pilot UHPR global peer review and participate as panelists, the Director General of WHO Dr Tedros, ADGs, Directors and colleagues representing the regional and country offices, it is my pleasant privilege and honor to extend warm welcome and greetings to all of you participating in this ground-breaking initiative.
I am honored to have the opportunity at the outset of this meeting to make a few salient remarks on the Universal Health and Preparedness Review (UHPR) from the perspective of the WHO South-East Asia Region.
It is universally acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the shortcomings in preparedness and readiness to emergencies and the capacity to respond to them at the local, national, regional, and global levels.
Some of the key challenges that have contributed to this reality are the gaps in multi-sectoral and multi-level collaboration needed to truly implement whole of government and whole of society strategies for health emergency risk management, and inadequate advocacy to place health security as one of the priority agendas of the Heads of Government and political leadership of countries; and lack of transparent sharing of information on the status of emergency preparedness and dialogue as peers on the cooperation needed between countries to improve the health security status in a spirit of solidarity.
While countries have been making effective use of the existing tools elaborated for monitoring and evaluation of the International Health regulations (IHR) core capacities such as the mandatory State Party Self-assessment Annual Report (SPAR) and the Joint External Evaluation (JEE) - the country I hail from was the first to use JEE in our region - these have unfortunately not provided optimal opportunity to overcome the challenges at the national and global levels that I have just alluded to.
With the assistance of WHO, Member states also specifically monitor and review the status of capacities and resilience of their health systems using separate tools, the relevant outputs of which are not incorporated into the assessments carried out on determining the country health security status.
Hence the need to design, pilot and implement a robust process that would enable intersectoral collaboration at country level and intercountry cooperation at the regional and global levels was rightfully perceived by the Member States and communicated to the WHO DG, who has provided the leadership for the elaboration of the Universal Health and Preparedness Review.
I strongly commend the government of Thailand for piloting UHPR in our region and volunteering to participate in the global peer review that is being trialed here.
It is my sincere expectation that the outcomes of this meeting will enable us to ensure the key objectives of the UHPR, which in our view, are:
- assisting the national health authorities to identify the priority overarching actions related to governance, legislation, financing and human resources and inter-sectoral actions that need to be taken at country level;
- empowering the national health authorities to reach across sectors and receive the support needed both from the sector leads and the national leadership to develop and effectively implement the action plans related to health security;
- supporting the countries to clearly distill their successes, and best practices which can be confidently shared with other member states for replication to contribute to regional and global health security; and
- providing the opportunity for countries to pinpoint the resource and capacity challenges that they can overcome with the support of other member states, development partners and global technical agencies for strengthening national health security.
I would like to note, that the UHPR, as initially conceived, specifically outlined a three-level process starting at the country level, leading on to the regional level and culminating at the global level in terms of dialogue and review. I urge both the member states and the secretariat to reinstitute the review of the national UHPR reports at the regional level, where more efficient and relevant inter-country cooperation can be fostered using all economic and development cooperation mechanisms available.
Taking this into consideration, the members states of the South-East Asia region have endorsed the Regional Strategic Roadmap on Health Security and Health System Resilience for Emergencies 2023 – 2027.
The Regional Strategic Roadmap envisages the establishment of a Regional Health Emergency Council (RHEC) that would be aligned with the outcomes of member states led negotiations on the Pandemic Treaty and Amendments to the IHR. Tentative provision for review of the national reports generated through UHPR has been made to enable the RHEC to facilitate sharing of lessons learned for more effective regional cooperation in the spirit of solidarity.
I sincerely wish that the deliberations at this meeting would be very fruitful, and I keenly look forward to the outcomes that helps us to collectively strengthen national, regional, and global health security going forward through a UHPR process that adds value without undue burden and duplication of efforts at country level.
Thank you very much.