In our latest policy briefing, Dr Ray Kent (Chief Operating Officer for The Pandemic Institute) and Dr Paul Atkinson (Senior Research Fellow in Public Health, Policy and Systems in the Institute of Population Health at The University of Liverpool) discuss the steps required to develop ‘Pandemic-proof cities’. With the UK’s COVID-19 inquiry currently in session, this timely briefing highlights the need to urgently reassess UK pandemic prevention plans, with a focus on improving the resilience of health systems. It recommends the creation of new pandemic prevention, preparedness and response taskforces at a sub-national level, working with local and regional policy measure capacity and build evidence on good pandemic-prevention practice. Drawing on lessons from Liverpool City Region’s rapid testing programme during the COVID-19 pandemic, which provided crucial data on the spread of the disease in late 2020 and early 2021, the authors conclude that now is the time to build systems to deal with the inevitable arrival, at some point in the future, of another pandemic.
DOI: 10.17638/03172459
Back to: Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place