Hosted by the GPH Department of Global & Environmental Health
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic underscored the importance of resilient health systems and the need to strengthen global health architecture for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. There are ongoing questions, however, about what policies and health agendas will best strengthen countries’ health systems and pandemic preparedness. Two of the most prioritized agendas, Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and Global Health Security (GHS), both seek to foster strong health systems for a healthier and safer world. Many countries, however, have had to prioritize one agenda over the other due to scarce resources and political pressures. Further, despite intensifying post-pandemic calls for the alignment and integration of health policies and investments in UHC and GHS, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the relative and synergistic contributions of UHC and GHS in protecting population health during health emergencies. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an unprecedented opportunity to fill this evidence gap and evaluate the protective effects of countries’ UHC or GHS capacities on their ability to safeguard essential health service delivery during a public health crisis. In this seminar, Yesim Tozan, PhD will present the quantitative research my group has pioneered in this area and discuss the possible policy implications of our findings.