Academic Integration into Pandemic Preparedness and Response Planning
The Bay Area Global Health Alliance, Healthy Davis Together, and UC Davis Grand Challenges laid the groundwork for building a roadmap for academic and private integration in pandemic preparedness and prevention on April 26-28. Inspired by wanting to ensure we will learn from and improve our collective pandemic response, this intimate gathering of private, non-profit, public, and academic sector members represented all regions across the US.
The two-and-a-half-day workshop facilitated participants’ sharing, learning, and connecting over their COVID-19 experiences. Through a series of case-study presentations and breakout sessions, the workshop group worked determinedly to ensure that the hard lessons of this pandemic wouldn’t be for naught. Participants brought to the workshop reflections on the challenges they faced, specifying structural obstacles needing removal and proven best practices that can be more quickly applied to better prevent and manage the next pandemic. It culminated in a roadmap priority presentation gathered directly from the participants' reports by Dr. Jonna Mazet, Vice Provost of Grand Challenges. The roadmap priorities detailed the group's takeaways, including pandemic learnings, unsolved challenges faced that still need solutions, and specific recommendations for the roadmap.
The workshop team is now hard at work finalizing policy briefs and technical documents started during this strategic convening. These products will be widely distributed across the private, non-profit, public, and academic sectors to provide solid guidance for what can be done now and what should be activated in a crisis to ensure pandemic resilience and health security for all.