The WHO’s Health Emergency (WHE) department at the WHO’s Regional Office for the South East Asia (SEARO) supports the Health Systems Development (HSD) department to integrate system developments to health emergency preparedness and response needs. In this context, two departments understood the need to strengthen knowledge related to medical oxygen as a lifesaving commodity to build more resilient local health care systems in resource constrained settings in the WHO’s South East Asia Region (SEAR).
For this task, it is imperative to create consolidated and updated knowledge on oxygen sources, supply options and life-sustaining oxygen delivery solutions based on the need in different contexts, including health emergencies. The most appropriate example related to the latter has been the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Against this backdrop, public health officials, policy-makers and health facilities must be geared to manage their medical oxygen services. Also, WHO country offices in Member States (MS) have to be strengthened in the SEAR. Towards this end, health departments and their different units, including COVID-19 pandemic response units at the national and sub-national levels in MS, other UN agencies working on medical oxygen, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on health care provision and knowledge development on medical oxygen, HSD department of SEARO in collaboration with WHE-SEARO initiated a project on “Strengthening knowledge on medical oxygen systems and their management”.
Objectives of the project
- To update and expand the scope of existing WHO briefs and guidance notes on medical oxygen, devices and their operation and maintenance
- To provide expert guidance on new knowledge needs (as identified through consultations with subject matter experts) that emerged during the interim period
- To review global guidelines issued by WHO and make it more contextual and relevant to SEA Member States
As this exercise aimed at identifying gaps and needs related to knowledge products on oxygen, it is very useful for the WHE department to identify areas for promoting or developing knowledge products and knowledge enhancements for the purpose of preparedness for and response to respiratory-borne infections of epidemics and pandemic potential.
Hence, the infectious hazard management (IHM) unit of WHE SEARO as the responsible unit in the health operations pillar of the incident management supporting team (IMST) of the COVID-19 pandemic response was involved in the project.
The Programme Area Manager (IHM) and the Consultant Biomedical Engineer of WHE department provided the perspectives of preparedness and response for health emergencies in alignment with the WHO’s emergency response framework (ERF) at the stages of planning, developing, and reviewing of the concept note and the technical report. They provided technical and operational inputs as key informants in interviews from the perspectives of biomedical engineering and managing clinical response to cases during COVID-19 surges.
The WHE department also supported the Health Technology unit of the HSD department to organize and conduct a webinar on 26 April 2022 to disseminate findings of the knowledge products to all stakeholders and MS. The webinar was attended by 480 participants from SEAR MS and that of other WHO regions. Notably there were 174 participants from India, 21 from Nepal, 13 from Indonesia and 12 from Bangladesh and remaining from other WHO regions.