Reviewing essential public health functions in the Eastern Mediterranean Region post COVID-19 pandemic: a foundation for system resilience.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in many health systems worldwide with profound implications for health and society. The public health challenges experienced during the pandemic have highlighted the importance of resilient health systems, that can adapt and transform to meet the population's evolving health needs. Essential public health functions (EPHFs) offer a holistic, integrated and sustainable approach to public health by contributing to achieving several health priorities and goals. In recent years, there has been a focused effort to conceptualise and define the EPHFs. In this paper, we describe the collaborative approach undertaken by the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) and UK Health Security Agency and present the findings and results of the revised EPHFs, in view of lessons learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic and the current priorities for countries across the EMR. This included conducting a desktop review, a gap and bottleneck analysis and stakeholder consultation to arrive at the revised EPHF model including four enablers and nine core functions, including a new function: public health services. The EPHFs will offer countries a complementary and synergistic approach to strengthen health systems and public health capacities and contribute to the region's ability to effectively respond to future health challenges and emergencies. By focusing on the EPHFs, countries can work towards ensuring health security as an integral goal for the health system besides universal health coverage, thus strengthening and building more resilient and equitable health systems.

The Tunisian experience of participatory health governance: the Societal Dialogue for Health (a qualitative study).

BACKGROUND: Tunisia has been engaged in the Societal Dialogue (SD) for Health process since 2012, a participatory health governance process aimed at bringing in people's voice into health policy-making. Its first success was the recently released National Health Policy 2030. This paper aims to document the SD process and to bring out the lessons learned to inspire other countries. METHODS: This study was based essentially on a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with citizen jury members and health experts that took place from May to September 2018. The qualitative analysis adopted an inductive-deductive approach according to a cross-matrix between the themes of the interview of the two groups of interviewees. RESULTS: The qualitative analysis of the data highlighted that the Societal Dialogue created a health democracy dynamic with inclusive dialogue spaces for the population, communities, and civil society to participate in health system design. It constituted a multi-actor and multidisciplinary coordination platform to increase consensus building among actors. Initial government support and high levels of volunteer commitment allowed the process to achieve a certain level of sustainability. However, this process faced and still faces many challenges such as overreliance on volunteers; a crisis of trust; political instability and the lack of an effective communication strategy. These challenges negatively influence the policy uptake of recommendations made by the Societal Dialogue for Health. CONCLUSION: The Tunisian societal dialogue experience highlights both the successes and challenges of a structured participatory platform, as well as the effort and perseverance it takes to keep such a process functional and relevant. A key lesson from this study is that this model of participatory health governance eventually reaches a stage where population, community, and civil society participation needs to be more institutionalized within the government routine so that it can credibly feed into health policy review processes and inform decision-makers on a regular basis.