CEMEC is proud to have contributed to the WHO Ministerial Conference “Protecting Health in Earthquakes”, organized in Istanbul by the WHO Regional Office for Europe and hosted by the Government of Turkey.
July 1-2, 2026, Istanbul-Türkiye
In particular, I spoke in the session, “Institutionalizing learning systems: evidence, research and after-action reviews,” together with my friend Prof. Rafael Castro-Delgado of the University of Oviedo, Dr. Allison Gocotano of WHO Nepal, Prof. Donald Donahue of WADEM, and Dr. İlkay Akçay of the Turkish Ministry of Health.The session was moderated by Dr. Tanja Schmidt and Dr. Samar Hammoud of the WHO Regional Office for Europe, with Dr. Laura Lloyd-Braff serving as rapporteur.
My intervention was developed around a fundamental principle: institutional memory is an infrastructure.
Like any other skill, it must be planned, supported with adequate resources, and constantly exercised. Otherwise, every earthquake will end up re-teaching us lessons we should have learned already.
Evidence gathered in the field becomes true preparation only when there is an institution responsible for transforming it into doctrine, training programs and operational procedures.
Furthermore, post-emergency reviews rarely fail in the analysis phase. Difficulties arise especially in the follow-up phase, when corrective actions are clear, but responsibilities, verification, and their effective implementation are less so.
This is the function that CEMEC has carried out since 1991, the year of its first designation as a WHO Collaborating Centre for Disaster Medicine, and which it continues today with the new designation as the “WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Security, CBRNe and the EMT Initiative”.
Training, operational research, and support for Emergency Medical Teams are the tools. Institutional continuity is the goal.
I would like to thank Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe, for facilitating a conference that placed health at the heart of the earthquake preparedness agenda, and Dr. Oleg Storozhenko of WHO/Europe for his invaluable and ongoing support.
The conference concluded with a ministerial roundtable discussion and a joint declaration. Declarations, by their nature, are not binding. Operational capabilities, however, must be.
What will really make a difference before the next emergency will be updated plans, trained teams, tested procedures, and actually completed corrective actions.
CEMEC will continue to work in this direction together with WHO and partner institutions in the European Region, in the belief that preparedness is built between emergencies, not during them.
#DisasterMedicine #HealthSafety #EmergencyPreparation #EmergencyMediciTeam #CBRNe #CEMEC
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