Assessing Public Health Emergency Preparedness: a scoping review on recent tools and methods

Abstract Assessing public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) can help monitor and improve systems’ capacities and capabilities. Yet, measuring preparedness is a complex process and available assessment approaches have numerous limitations. To review gaps and strengths of current assessment tools and methods, a scoping review was conducted based on peer-assessed and grey literature published between 2013 and 2019 describing PHEP assessments. A total of 32 articles were selected, the majority being assessments implemented at national level (44%, N=14). Assessments were mainly formatted as questionnaires/surveys (41%, N=13), followed by checklists (25%, N=8), interviews or group discussions (16%, N=5), and tools that extracted information directly from data sources (13%, N=4). The most frequent analytical approach adopted in the reviewed articles was quantitative analysis (N=16, 50%), followed by qualitative analysis (N=12, 38%) and mixed methods (N=3, 9%). In most of the articles the assessment results were reported by listing gaps (N=9, 28%) in preparedness, a preparedness score with defined preparedness levels/margins (N=6, 19%) or a preparedness score with descriptive figures (N=6, 19%). The elements of preparedness incorporated in each assessment were also reviewed in this paper, the most common domains being “Pre-event preparation and governance” and “Event response management”. Overall, from the reviewed articles, we identified important features and points of improvement that assessment approaches should undertake. These suggestions include the need for assessments to identify and specify appropriate stakeholders to conduct and complete the evaluation; the importance of reaching a consensus on what preparedness standards to measure; and the need for further research on minimising the biases specific to each assessment format.