World Health Day: crucial to ensure safety of hospitals as harmful effects on climate change are felt

Tuesday, 07 April 2009 09:15

7 APRIL 2009 | GENEVA/BEIJING -- WHO is today celebrating World Health Day by focusing attention on the large numbers of lives that can be saved during earthquakes, floods, conflicts and other emergencies through better design and construction of health facilities and by preparing and training health staff.

“With our world threatened by the harmful effects of climate change, more frequent extreme weather events and armed conflicts, it is crucial that we all do more to ensure that health care is available at all times to our citizens, before, during, or after a disaster,” said WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan. 

WHO is recommending six core actions that governments, public health authorities and hospital managers can undertake to make their health facilities safe during emergencies. These include training health workers, designing and building safe hospitals, retrofitting existing health facilities to make them more resilient and ensuring staff and supplies are secure.

The six steps that governments, public health authorities and others who operate hospitals and health care facilities can take are to:
1. assess the safety of hospitals;
2. protect and train health workers for emergencies;
3. plan for emergency response;
4. design and build resilient hospitals;
5. adopt national policies and programmes for safe hospitals; and
6. protect equipment, medicines and supplies.

Too often, health facilities are the first casualties of emergencies. This means that health workers are killed and wounded, that services are not available to treat survivors and that large investments of valuable health funding in health facility construction and equipment are squandered.

World Health Day is being launched in China this year, where an earthquake in May 2008 killed over 87 000 people and destroyed more than 11 000 health care facilities.