WHO steps up its role in health emergencies

News Q: How did you first become interested in working in emergencies? A: When I started out as a physician during the early 1970s, I wanted to work with communities, rather than in hospitals , particularly in places where people were unable to access health services. I worked in Kurdistan in northern Iraq in 1974, in rural Nepal, eastern India and then Bangladesh. But my interest in community health was there before I studied medicine. I wanted to understand what was needed for people to be less distressed, and not to suffer when ill – wherever they lived, and whether they were poor or wealthy. When I worked in areas affected by conflict I realized that the challenges are the same as anywhere else but that it's more difficult to ensure that people can access the health care they need. Q: Can you tell us about your appointment as the UN Secretary-General's special envoy for Ebola in 2014 and how the outbreak triggered soul-searching and reconsideration of the way health emergencies are addressed? A: The outbreak was bigger than anything we' d seen before and moving so fast that organizations had to develop and revise their action plans while they were being implemented. The presidents of the most affected countries were asking the UN to play a leading role in ensuring they were properly supported. They felt abandoned. Flights to their countries had been cut. They weren't receiving the help they needed. I was working with [WHO Director-General] Margaret Chan, the Secretary-General [Ban Ki-moon] and senior advisers as they sought a massive scale-up in support of the affected countries. The Secretary-General proposed a totally new mechanism, based on what is used for UN peacekeeping operations, to give extra muscle and coordination to the international response. It became known as the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response or UNMEER for short. UNMEER was approved by the UN General Assembly and endorsed by the UN Security Council in the middle of September 2014: it was implemented in record time. It was developed at a time when we did not know how big the outbreak would become, with some projections that more than a million people would become infected. " It is never one organization alone that responds to an emergency, partnerships are essential. " Q: The Report of the Ebola Interim Assessment Panel released this year found that coordination was weak between …