Public Health Situation Analysis Standard Operating Procedures
Overview
Humanitarian needs assessments are carried out to determine the immediate needs of a population following an emergency or humanitarian crisis, serving as a basis for operational response. The purpose of the Public Health Situation Analysis (PHSA) specifically is to identify the current health status and potential health threats that the population may face, the functioning of the health system, and the humanitarian health response. It is a review of the latest available secondary data.
The PHSA aims to provide all health sector partners, including local and national authorities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), donor agencies and United Nations agencies with a common and comprehensive understanding of the public health situation in a crisis in order to inform evidence based collective humanitarian health response planning.
The PHSA may also be used to feed other sectoral and intersectoral products, such as providing the health input to the Humanitarian Needs Overview, and is also used in support of the WHO (re-)grading process. The PHSA is conducted in response to a sudden-onset Emergency, defined by the WHO Emergency Response Framework (ERF) as “a situation impacting the lives and well-being of a large number of people or significant percentage of a population requiring substantial multi-sectoral assistance. For WHO to respond, there must be clear health consequences”.
The PHSA updates and replaces the previous Public Health Risk Assessment (PHRA) prepared by WHO. Like the PHRA, the PHSA includes a risk assessment of the major threats faced by a population; additionally, the PHSA expands on the PHRA by including the elements of humanitarian response capacity. The PHSA does not include recommendations about priority interventions, as the PHSA is meant to serve as a springboard for on-the-ground response joint response planning amongst all health cluster/sector partners, informed by local capacities/resources/limitations/political consideration