What 'Resilience' Means to the WHO's New Health Envoy: Strong Systems, Primary Care, Response
Dr. Vanessa Kerry, the World Health Organization's new special envoy for health resilience, has a definition that fits on a sticky note: resilience boils down to being prepared. In global health, she says, that means strong systems, primary care and the ability to respond.
Kerry is the founder and CEO of Seed Global Health. NPR describes that nonprofit as having spent more than a decade building resilience in lower-resource countries by dispatching coaches and mentors to educate and train local healthcare students and practitioners, as well as building financial and material resources.
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Kerry's own critique of the status quo is blunt: funding has gone disease by disease and crisis by crisis, and building responsive healthcare systems is what her new job is about. It is a diagnosis more than a plan, and the plan is the hard part.
Every health ministry on earth would sign off on 'strong systems, primary care and the ability to respond' — a phrase survives precisely because nobody objects to it. Her sharper claim is that this isn't a daunting task: train health workers, and they can monitor, provide healthcare, and deliver surveillance and prevention themselves. That is the testable part, which makes the slogan the boring part.