June 30, 2023
By Kimberly Ramkhalawan
Lessons to be learnt from the Pandemic are far and wide, and while the Pan American Health Organisation, PAHO, convened in Washington DC for its Executive Council meeting, there is a call for member states to be honest and truthful in sharing their data collected during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
While the pandemic might be over, as declared by the World Health Organisation earlier this year, PAHO is putting together a report on how its member states handled and fared during this period.
This year Jamaica’s Minister of Health & Wellness, Dr. Christopher Tufton, MP, is currently serving as President of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Executive Council and is presiding over the four-day meeting.
And while he thanked the organization for its assistance to Jamaica in doing its own internal assessment of his country’s quality response, he questioned whether the report would be put forward to its member states. He also expressed concerns over principles that may have emanated from the report that would have pointed to member states conducting their own evaluations, since many countries’ lacked resources. This he said this would have shown that many states, particularly small island states were not in an equal position in terms of resources, and were particularly vulnerable in terms of resources like vaccines and PPEs.
With that in mind, he called for this to be a priority on the next phase of the process.
Dr Tufton remarked that during the COVID 19 pandemic, PAHO was forced to operate as a globe, rather than within the hemisphere it deals with, in its response to the virus, and questioned “to what extent a report of this kind would be used to try to influence a wider more global agenda around lessons learned from COVID”.
Using Jamaica as an example, and like most other SIDS, who had to reach out well beyond the America’s for support, he noted that “sometimes support even though willing, had barriers because the logistics of movement, it dictated that things had to flow through third party and entities, organizations, logistics arrangements.”
He expressed hopes that the report should ideally allow countries to assess what can be done hemispherically to strengthen PAHO’s capacity as a regional body.
And while he hopes lessons learnt from this pandemic may not have to be put to use in the near future or within this generation, he shared it was necessary “to recognize those essential initiatives that are required for greater global collaboration”.
Also present was Dr. Carissa F. Etienne PAHO/WHO, Director Emeritus who shared that at the time the Pandemic hit, PAHO was at its lowest in terms of resources, not only financially, but also lost a large contingent of its consultants, forcing its remaining staff to “double up quickly”.
She said “the whole question of the deciding to do the evaluation, was imperative”, as PAHO had a “responsibility to ensure that it documented what happened, what went well, and what did not go well”, as it had no guideline from the last pandemic and admitted that they too “were learning and acting” as they went along.
However, Dr Etienne said it was not only for PAHO to document their experience, but it was the responsibility of every government and all institutions to document truthfully their experiences and to have this external evaluation.
From documenting this kind of information, she says PAHO can learn from member states, noting that as a hemispheric organization, it cannot operate alone, especially if it is going through a reform and transformation process. She notes that “as far as being ready for pandemics, we need to learn where member states are. And that sort of information would be really of high significance if the institution itself has to plan differently, and so to support this planning process”.
Currently, Dr Jarbas Barbosa, the new PAHO/WHO Director, who took over from Dr Etienne in February this year, has launched together with his team a plan of action to address these findings.