Workforce capacity assessment for public health emergencies, disaster preparedness and response in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region, April - July, 2018

Abstract

Introduction: Recent outbreaks in Africa have exposed the limited regional response capacities in disease surveillance, preparedness and rapid response strategies. Workforce development is one of the major core capacities of the International Health Regulations to respond to public health emergencies. However, this was identified as a major gap in the Joint External Evaluations in most countries in the West African sub-region. Hence, we conducted an assessment of the field epidemiology workforce capacity in Member States using the global standard of five epidemiologists per million population.