Abstract
Background: The International Health Regulations (IHR) are a legally binding instrument designed to improve Global Health Security by limiting the cross boarder spread of health risks. All 196 signatories to the IHR (2005) are required to report progress towards IHR core capacity implementation through an annual multi-sectoral self-assessment process known as the State Parties Self-Assessment Annual Reporting (SPAR). This mandatory process sits alongside the voluntary, external, peer-reviewed Joint External Evaluations (JEE) as two core components of the IHR monitoring and evaluation framework. JEEs are intended to occur once every 4–5 years following a voluntary request from the member state. This means that interim monitoring of IHR core capacity compliance, can be challenging and additional data sources are required. The outputs of the SPAR process represent one such source. Although the JEE and SPAR tools are intended to be complimentary, there has been no publicly available mapping of JEE indicators to SPAR indicators in order to inform progress on IHR compliance.
Results: This paper mapped JEE indicators to SPAR indicators and found a high level of correlation suggesting the SPAR process offers a method for countries and technical assistance programmes to monitor progress on IHR compliance and identify gaps in between JEE visits. However, coverage was not complete, and several gaps were identified most notably in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and vaccinations.
Conclusion: Enhancing alignment between JEE and SPAR could offer a more consistent and complete way of assessing compliance with IHR.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 69 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Globalization and Health |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 30 Jun 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information: No funding was used for this work. All authors work for Public Health England’s IHR Strengthening Project, a UK Aid-funded project.Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
Publisher Copyright:© 2021, The Author(s).
Citation: Razavi, A., Collins, S., Wilson, A. et al. Evaluating implementation of International Health Regulations core capacities: using the Electronic States Parties Self-Assessment Annual Reporting Tool (e-SPAR) to monitor progress with Joint External Evaluation indicators. Global Health 17, 69 (2021).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-021-00720-5
Keywords
- Aid and development
- Global Health security
- International health regulations
- Joint external evaluations
- Monitoring and evaluation
- Technical support
- World Health Organization
