Defining community protection: a core concept for strengthening the global architecture for health emergency preparedness, response and resilience

Overview

Far from receding, health emergencies are increasing in size, scale, and complexity, with many countries responding to multiple crises concurrently. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed deep flaws in the world’s defences against health emergencies, exposed and exacerbated profound inequities within and between countries and communities, and eroded trust in governments and institutions. Against this background and built on over 300 recommendations from COVID-19 lessons learned, the health emergency preparedness, response and resilience (HEPR) framework provides a renewed and integrated approach to strengthen the global architecture for health emergency management. HEPR calls for progress to be made across five intersecting subsystems of collaborative surveillance; community protection; safe and scalable clinical care; and access to medical countermeasures, and emergency coordination.

This paper defines and details community protection.