Risk Management and Healthcare Policy

Rethinking Public Health Approaches to Crisis Response: Putting People First

Recent decades have seen increasingly unpredictable outbreaks of zoonotic and emerging infectious diseases, changing climate, widespread economic crises and regular outbreaks of violent conflict. The uncertainty of these crises makes it difficult to plan and meet the health needs of the populations facing them. Moreover, indigenous knowledge and the experiences and views of affected populations are rarely considered part of preparedness planning or crisis-response, despite being critical to it. Research has called for greater commitment to involving a variety of local first responders in public health crises as a key step to establishing the inclusive, trust-based decision-making critical for effective crisis response. However, there is little robust evidence from the health sector of “what works” or “why it works”.  This Collection contains papers that detail actions, experiences, models, or mechanisms of the involvement of community members and local knowledge in responses to any clearly defined public health crisis.