The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has published a new guide on how to run “in-action” and “after-action” reviews of public health emergencies.
The guide is designed for organisations responsible for responding to health emergencies and sets out step-by-step instructions for reviewing what happened during an incident and turning findings into practical changes, the ECDC announced on Wednesday.
In-action reviews are carried out during an emergency to identify immediate improvements to the ongoing response, while after-action reviews take place once an emergency is over to examine the response and inform future planning.
The approach is intended to bring together all stakeholders involved in an emergency response to share experiences and agree actions to improve response activities.
“Learning from every public health emergency is essential if we want to improve how we respond to the next one,” Thomas Hofmann, Head of Section for Emergency Preparedness and Response at ECDC, said in the statement.
He noted the review process should go beyond understanding what happened by identifying what worked and what did not, and translating lessons into practical actions.
What the guide covers
The guide outlines three stages — preparing for a review, conducting it, and following up afterwards — and provides detailed instructions for running the workshop at the centre of the process, the ECDC said.
It also includes editable templates for supporting documents referenced in the guide, intended to make the process easier to carry out.
The guide builds on earlier ECDC guidance and the agency’s experience of conducting action reviews in different settings, and is framed as support for countries aligning with the EU’s prevention, preparedness and response plan for health crises and rules on serious cross-border health threats.
