Building Global Health Security

Designing, evidencing and implementing the World Health Organization’s Health Systems for Health Security (HSforHS) framework for building sustained resilience to acute health emergencies

Recent health emergencies highlight the need for countries to identify core capacities and existing gaps to ensure that health systems are prepared to withstand the increased stress caused by severe and large health emergencies. Professor Garrett Brown has collaborated with the World Health Organization (WHO) to co-design, evidence, co-write, and implement the WHO Health Systems for Health Security framework (HSforHS) to strengthen capacities required for the effective management of health emergencies. Launched at the University of Leeds in 2022, HSforHS has now been piloted in two test countries: Sri Lanka and Kenya. In collaboration with WHO, an NHSP Protocol was created and tested within both pilot countries to determine how HSforHS can best inform national level health planning and to revise the protocol from those learnings. Professor Brown worked with WHO to determine best practice and lessons from those pilots. The HSforHS framework is directly linked and cross-referenced with the 2024 International Health Regulations (IHRs), which were adopted at the  World Health Assembly, underpinning global health security.

In collaboration with the University of Leeds Digital Education Service and WHO, Professor Brown also co-designed, implemented, and taught on the WHO HSforHS training program. Launched in 2024, the program is currently online via the WHO Academy, a platform hosting all WHO training packages and has delivered training to its first 639 health professionals.

Professor Brown was an invited member of WHO Dynamic Preparedness Matric (DPM) Technical Working Group. The DPM is an on-line platform for use by member states and the public to identify real time preparedness gaps within national health systems and to receive scorecards locating areas for improvement and investment. His role on the Technical Working Group was to help with the selection of health system capacity indicators and to assign weight depending on their prioritization. In addition, Professor Brown provided research and experiments to determine the appropriateness of the weighting in practice and refined how various weighing models resulting in gap identification and scorecard results. The DPM is currently online as a toolkit for HSforHS and pandemic preparedness efforts to inform countries’ strategic thinking on health system investments and capacity building for health emergencies.

Image by Riccardo Niels Mayer at Adobe Stock

Key publications

Paul, E., Brown, G. W.,  Ridde, V. (2020). COVID-19: time for paradigm shift in the nexus between local, national and global health. BMJ Global Health, 5(4), e002622. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2020-002622

Brown, G. W., Bridge, G., Martini, J., Um, J., Williams, O. D., Choupe, L. B. T., . . . Kandel, N. (2022). The role of health systems for health security: A scoping review revealing the need for improved conceptual and practical linkages. Globalization and Health, 18. doi:10.1186/s12992-022-00840-6

Kandel N, Chungong S on behalf of WHO Technical Working Group of the Dynamic Preparedness Metric and Health Security Preparedness Department (2022),

Dynamic preparedness metric: a paradigm shift to measure and act on preparedness. The Lancet Global Health, Vol 10, Issue 5: e615-e61