In new WHO role, Vanessa Kerry will focus on building health system resilience
Vanessa Kerry, newly named special envoy for health resilience at the World Health Organization (WHO), said in an Oct. 20 NPR article that she plans to focus on helping build health systems so that when outbreaks or other emergencies occur, nations will be ready.
Kerry is an associate professor in Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health, director of the department’s program in global health and climate policy, and founder and CEO of Seed Global Health, a nonprofit that builds resilience in lower-resource countries.
She told NPR that she hopes to help countries avoid having to scramble when new outbreaks emerge. “If a nation does not have a health system infrastructure in place, they will probably not be prepared to respond to the emergency,” she said. “Resilience means building a system that will already be in place.”
She added, “We’ve been funding disease by disease and crisis by crisis,” she told NPR. “We can be thinking about this differently.”
Read the NPR article:
Vanessa Kerry is the new WHO envoy for health resilience. What’s on her to-do list?
