Kerala takes pandemic preparedness to grassroots

Past epidemics and pandemics have left many lessons, which have helped nations to understand the threat posed by pathogens, especially the respiratory pathogens, which have enhanced pandemic potential.

These experiences have also highlighted the critical gaps in preparedness and responses of health systems and have brought the focus on the importance of planning and preparing health systems to tackle public health emergencies

Kerala has thus launched a unique initiative of taking pandemic preparedness to the grassroots and the Health department has tasked all districts and panchayats to build pandemic preparedness plans, which are local, relevant to the regional context and most importantly, which can be operationalised on ground.

“We are navigating a new era of preparedness for epidemics, pandemics and other public health emergencies and it is important that this preparedness is taken to the level of local self-government (LSG) bodies because we do not want them to be caught offguard, when disasters strike. The idea is to prepare a feasible and practical plan of action by drawing from the State’s previous experiences with influenza A (H1N1), COVID-19, Nipah, etc. as well as World Health Organisation/national guidelines for managing health emergencies. These localised plans should embed well within the existing guidelines of district disaster management authorities and LSG structures like Arogya Jagratha Samithis,” a senior health official told The Hindu.

Next pandemic

According to the WHO, the chances that the world will see another pandemic with as many deaths as COVID-19 in the next ten years has been estimated at 22-28%. It says that the investment required to be adequately prepared for the next pandemic will be far less than the socio-economic costs

“Pandemic plans should be feasible, practical, action-oriented and it is important that these align with existing emergency response plans so that interoperability is possible. We have leaned heavily on the WHO’s Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET) document to draw up reference materials on how to go about drawing up our plans,” the official added.

PRET initiative launched by the WHO in 2023 is an innovative approach to improving disease pandemic preparedness for future events. It recognises that the same systems, capacities, knowledge, and tools can be leveraged and applied for groups of pathogens based on their mode of transmission (respiratory, vector-borne, food-borne etc.).

Districts and panchayats have thus been working on this project since the past several weeks, drawing up a step-wise approach to pandemic preparedness.

Key factors

This involves doing a preparedness assessment; analysis of capabilities and capacities as well as mapping of key actors, partners and stakeholders; a short checklist-based self-assessment at both district and LSG level to understand baseline capacity and gaps. Assessing core capacities- surveillance, laboratory access, clinical surge (beds, oxygen, triage), supply chains, risk communication, logistics, and social support mechanisms is another important step. Defining governance, roles and structure; converting assessment findings into a short, action-oriented plan that panchayats can adopt and adapt; building and organising critical capacities and engaging and strengthening the resilience of communities.

The various scenarios under which pandemic/health critical event preparedness plans need to be developed have been identified disease outbreaks; disasters such as landslides, floods; major disasters such as tsunami or earthquakes and major rail/bus/burn accidents.

“This is a work in progress and our initial focus is on pandemic preparedness for managing respiratory pathogens, following which we will move on to preparedness plans for other scenarios,” officials said.