Global health emergency corps framework

Overview

The Global Health Emergency Corps (GHEC) was launched in May 2023 by WHO with Member States and partners as part of the efforts to strengthen the global health emergency preparedness and response architecture. GHEC is anchored within the broader WHO Health Emergency Prevention, Preparedness, Response and Resilience (HEPR) framework and embraces an approach to emergency coordination and collaboration that recognizes the need to collaborate across the core capability areas of collaborative surveillance, community protection, safe and scalable care, and access to countermeasures (the ‘5Cs’). The Global Health Emergency Corps describes the body of experts in ministries and agencies in every country who work on health emergencies and the global ecosystem through which they coordinate. The GHEC framework is designed to provide guiding principles for standardizing health emergency workforce structures to strengthen the capacity of countries in responding to health emergencies, and to enhance collaboration between countries by better connecting regional and global surge response mechanisms, facilitating information exchange, and improving access to expertise and human response capacity at times of need. This is the first version of the GHEC framework and is intended to be updated as experience is gained with its implementation and adaptation.