Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

Throughout the pandemic, many health systems across the world have come within days of being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, and others have been unable to prevent their systems from being overwhelmed. Pakistan have adopted “health stewardship” as an approach to ensure public health is a “joint function of national and provincial governments, where service delivery relies on mixed health systems”. The response in Singh district, which has the highest rate of COVID-19 cases in Pakistan, was underpinned by public-private partnerships with local government. This provides insights into how public-private engagement can be accelerated during the crisis and how “existing policy windows can be used for longer-term planning for pandemics and Universal Health Coverage”. Consider that:

• Stewarding partnerships enabled rapid acceleration of testing through private laboratories, supported surge capacity to be met in local private hospitals and increased “critical care training of public sector hospitals” through partnerships with private hospitals
• “Health stewardship” can enable advisory relationships with the private sector to create a joint operational response and strategic communications during crisis
• Procurement (e.g. of PPE) and supply chain management can be enhanced through “digitalised data-sharing of cases and hospital capacity across private and public providers”
• Stewardship relationships may be transactional (e.g. limited to purchasing arrangements) but can also include “wide-ranging formal agreements for co-production”, providing an opportunity to reform public and private health partnerships
• Devolved operations have proven to offer a flexible and effective response where there is rapid “data sharing for national-provincial coordination, and well-informed local governments who can mobilize inclusive and co-produced responses”

Schools have an increased need for support during lockdowns to provide children with the resources they need to learn effectively. Many other organisations are also under significant pressure during COVID-19, but some are coping particularly well as customer demand has increased hugely. Such organisations may have the capacity, capability and willingness to support the parents of schoolchildren in their local community. Consider encouraging local organisations and others to:

• Coordinate community activities on behalf of a school, for example, to:
  • Collect unused computers from businesses and the public so they can be reformatted and given to school children to enable them to access online learning support
  • Provide computer training and skills for local parents so they can assist their children, particularly young children
• Offer free printing of schoolwork for parents of school children who do not have printing services at home
• Make servers available to host school content which can be downloaded by parents
• Contribute financially to support schools to pay for new forms of online schooling, new content, and access to privileged services
• Work with schools to support them to build capability, for example, to:
  • Evaluate and learn the technology that is available and how to use this in online learning
  • Convert materials to make them suitable for online learning
  • Remap donated computers to enable them to be distributed to school children
• Provide specialist services to schools, e.g. readers of braille, sign language, adapting written materials into the spoken word, supporting children with disabilities
• Provide COVID-19 hygiene supplies to schools (e.g. facemasks and hand sanitising stations)
• Actively help Head Teachers in their role, for example, to interpret guidance and its application in their schools, and to support networking and mutual aid between schools