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Dr. Palitha Abeykoon appointed to world body monitoring preparedness for health emergencies
View(s):A Sri Lankan health expert has been appointed to the high-level Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) co-convened by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Bank.
Dr. Palitha Abeykoon, Senior Advisor to the Health Ministry and a former WHO Special Envoy for COVID-19 Preparedness and Response, has been appointed to the new board membership on September 30. 
The GPMB will be co-chaired by Botswana’s former Health Minister Joy Phumaphi, with Sir Jeremy Farrar, Director of Wellcome and a leading clinician-scientist, serving alongside her on an interim basis.
The GPMB is charged with providing a comprehensive appraisal of global preparedness for health emergencies. This is in view the COVID-19 pandemic revealing gaps in how the world understands and monitors preparedness, with human elements such as leadership and trust and the performance of multiple sectors found to be crucial to response and, therefore, to the evaluation of overall preparedness.
The GPMB’s 16 board members include former policymakers, diplomats, and other leading professionals with expertise including human rights, economics, law, veterinary epidemiology, environment, gender, global health and development. The member-selection has been based on their leadership, reputation and independence, with a view to ensuring diversity and balance in gender, geography and sectoral experience.
With negotiations underway to create new global health emergency governance structures, including the Pandemic Treaty and newly established Financial Intermediary Fund, the GPMB has emphasised the need for a robust independent monitoring mechanism to shine a light on key gaps in preparedness within the global health architecture, ensuring that actions taken are as effective as possible.
The GPMB was established in the aftermath of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as an independent monitoring and advocacy mechanism to prepare for and mitigate the effects of global health emergencies. Each year, the board prepares a report that assesses the state of global preparedness for health emergencies and lays out a roadmap for a safer world.
In its first report in September 2019, ‘A World At Risk’, it predicted the immediate threat of a major respiratory pandemic that would cause many millions of deaths and damage the world economy. Its latest report, ‘From Worlds Apart to a World Prepared’, argues that the failures of the COVID-19 pandemic were rooted in inequality and inaction and exacerbated by geopolitical division. It called for a renewed social contract with equity at its core and laid out six solutions for a safer world.
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