Partnership development
The objective of this new project is to ensure sustainability of national public health laboratories after the completion of the two year intergrated programme for laboratory specialists, through the development of partnership twinning programmes between institutions in developed and developing countries.
The partnership programme will be founded on volunteerism, as it will demand a strong long-term commitment from the country laboratories as well as from the developed institution counterparts, which will be sought amongst WHO Collaborating Centres and other research or public health entities.
After identification of needs, contacts will be established between the country laboratories and the developed institutions in order to define commonly agreed programmes, including:
- exchange and transfer information, knowledge and skills
- identification of monitoring tools for sustainability
- development of research programmes
- joint work on solutions toward the objective of building a sustainable network of laboratories able to participate in the global surveillance of epidemic-prone diseases.
The role of the WHO Programme for Health Security Capacity Development will be:
- to facilitate contacts between country laboratories and developed institutions
- to help to define the contents and expected outcomes of partnership programmes
- to check their relevance to the overall goal of sustainability
- to follow up and assess the outcomes of the collaborative programmes
- to coordinate the constitution of a network of collaborating laboratories.