The rapid and sustained outbreak transmission in the West African Ebola virus disease outbreak in 2014–15 was preceded by significant health systems weaknesses in the three most affected nations; Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The gaps in public health preparedness were missed, in part as a result of absence or limitations of the then existing preparedness measurement tools. Since then, several global and regional assessment metrics have been published.
In this work, we examined the design and the outputs of four epidemic and pandemic preparedness assessment metrics published since 2016 to ascertain their output comparability, validity across several countries, robustness in quantifying preparedness capacities and gaps, and the convergence of scales of measurement.
Methods and materials: Four assessment metrics; WHO's Joint External Evaluation (JEE), Global Health Security (GHS) Index, Metabiota's Epidemic Preparedness Index (EPI), and African Risk Capacity Preparedness Index (API) were iteratively examined using an independently validated data abstraction tool specifically designed for this analysis. The data were analysed in EpiInfo statistical software.
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