Resilient Health Infrastructure

Dear Members of the Community of Practice on Resilient Health Infrastructure (CoP-RHI),

Greetings!

We thank you for joining the CoP-RHI! We welcome you all in the second year of this Community on RHI.

The CoP-RHI was launched and operationalized jointly by CDRI and WHO India in August 2024. In the formative year, we focused on building the Community with esteemed experts from 'health', 'infrastructure' and other domains related to DRR. We reached to 28 members representing 18 countries. 

In the first year we received valuable support from the Community members in 'developing a Framework for Resilient Health Infrastructure (RHI), which was subsequently reviewed by WHO, PAHO, and other partner organizations. The Framework document is being finalized.

Towards end of the first year, the Community members have suggested a need to develop a knowledge product on Resilient Health Infrastructure - to unpack various aspects of RHI. Through consultative process we drafted a proposal for the knowledge product, which is now being jointly curated by CDRI and PAHO (PAN American Health Organization), and chapter contributions from partner organizations. This knowledge product will align to RHI Framework, and is envisioned as a report with 8-10 chapters (each chapter about 5 pages). The report targets policymakers of health systems. It will feature concepts and case studies from different geographies. A core team of contributors is working on various chapters.

In the second year of CoP-RHI, we aim to host the activities of Community on this DRI Connect platform. We also aim to organize dissemination events and publish the knowledge product on RHI by January 2026.

We invite all the members of CoP-RHI on this platform to suggest list/links of published case studies/examples that can inform the knowledge product on RHI. These case studies should focus on resilience aspects of health infrastructure. Indicative list of topics may include, but not limited to, 

1. Examples of health facilities successfully managing/responding to mass casualty events or disasters.
2. Hospital assessments for safety or resilience at asset or systems level.
3. Strengthening hospital designs with consideration of climate change or geo-physical hazards
4.  Retrofitting of hospitals for resilience
5. Examples of strengthening critical infrastructure services such as power, telecom, transport, water, waste management, medical gas management for hospitals (inside or outside hospital campus).
6. Cases of lessons from hospital fire incident/preparedness.
7. Post disaster assessments focused on health infrastructure.
8. Initiatives to strengthen policy, governance, financing or capacity of state/countries for RHI.
9. Cases of community level resilient of health infrastructure.
10. Examples of local/traditional knowledge being used for strengthening health systems.

Above list is only tentative, and we welcome your thoughts for any suggestions. Based on suggested examples, we will reach out to you to seek more details. 

To contact CDRI health team, please write to [Health@cdri.world; cc - Ratnesh@cdri.world; Aparajita.Suman@cdri.world].

 Regards,

Ratnesh