Event highlights
19 June 2024
The Early Warning Alert and Response (EWAR) in Emergencies training was conducted in Sofia, Bulgaria on 14–17 May 2024. This event was facilitated by the EWAR team from WHO/Europe, in partnership with and through funding provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The event was attended by representatives of the WHO Country Office in Bulgaria, and 23 participants including frontline health workers, district and national surveillance and laboratory teams, epidemiologists, data scientists, and policy-makers involved in health decision-making and surveillance.
This training, based on the core modules of WHO’s “Early Warning Alert and Response in Emergencies: an operational guide”, supported Bulgaria's efforts to detect acute public health events as early as possible, with the following overall aims:
- to enhance technical understanding of the EWAR in Emergencies core modules for national teams;
- to build capacity to detect acute public health events as early as possible
- to enable national teams to respond more effectively to health emergencies, and thus reduce their impact on health
- to improve the trust of the population in the public health system
- to contribute to fulfilling our collective commitments to the International Health Regulations (2005).
Event notice
14 May 2024
On 14–17 May 2024, the WHO Country Office in Bulgaria, in partnership with the WHO Regional Office for Europe’s Health Emergency Information and Risk Assessment unit of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, will launch the third in a pilot series of training events on Early Warning Alert and Response (EWAR) in Emergencies. The event brings together the Ministry of Health of Bulgaria, oblast surveillance teams, and public health epidemiologists and emergency response teams.
The training will help countries to rapidly detect acute public health events during an emergency and in the face of new emerging scenarios, carry out signal verification and rapid risk assessment, manage EWAR system information, and implement an effective and appropriate response to reduce the negative impact to health and increase crisis leadership. The goal of the training is to strengthen surveillance, risk assessment, and response during an emergency.
Emergency planning minimizes the impact of emergencies on lives, health systems, infrastructure, and lands. When emergencies strike, even the strongest health systems are immediately under strain. WHO’s role is to help countries to identify potential risks and vulnerabilities and prepare for and respond to health emergencies as efficiently and quickly as possible.
In the WHO European Region, natural disasters and public health and humanitarian crises have had severe health consequences in recent years among WHO Member States. The COVID-19 pandemic and the recent crisis in Ukraine have further impacted health systems, and there is a pressing need to strengthen national capacities in EWAR.
In 2022, WHO published an operational guide that includes the most up-to-date technical guidance for EWAR in Emergencies. This regional training will be based on this guide and on the lessons learned from conducting this training in other Member States, as part of the wider pilot training series.
The training is organized with financial support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.