An incomplete picture: data limitations in costed National Action Plans for Health Security (NAPHS)

Reliable data, including both global and national-level estimates, are critical to inform ongoing financing decisions, including those at the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund, where the first round of funding has already been released and additional calls for funding are expected shortly. Since 2016, the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:BMJ global health 2024-02, Vol.9 (2), p.e014067
Main Authors: Weets, Ciara M, Eaneff, Stephanie, Katz, Rebecca
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Budgets
Capacity development
Commentary
Cost estimates
Extranets
Funding
Health policy
National plans
Pandemics
Surveillance
Trends
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Summary:Reliable data, including both global and national-level estimates, are critical to inform ongoing financing decisions, including those at the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund, where the first round of funding has already been released and additional calls for funding are expected shortly. Since 2016, the WHO has worked with countries to assess their existing health security capacity, and to follow those assessments with national plans and budgets to address any identified gaps. None of the published NAPHS on the WHO portal were available for download in a machine-readable format, for example, a comma separated value file (.csv) or an Excel file (.xls), necessitating a significant amount of human labour to make these data accessible and actionable. [...]costed NAPHS data that are publicly available paint an incomplete picture of health security investment requirements. .6 Such examples of missing data exist across numerous costed NAPHS, and have substantial implications for the use of these data without more detailed considerations of the underlying data sets and their limitations. [...]published line-item cost data reflect known limitations of both the NAPHS and JEE process, including a primary focus on national-level activities (vs subnational) and potential underestimates of personnel and capital investments, both of which also depend on the version of the assessment used to generate cost estimates.7 Put simply, using published data from NAPHS documents with zero-ed out or otherwise incomplete costs, without somehow accounting for these costs, will lead to underestimates of the true funds required for PPR capacity building.
ISSN:2059-7908
2059-7908
DOI:10.1136/bmjgh-2023-014067