WHO is offering free online courses on COVID-19: Operational Planning Guidelines and COVID-19 Partners Platform to support country preparedness and response. This 3-module learning package introduces the context for the need for a coordinated global response plan to the COVID-19 outbreak. It provides the required guidance to implement the Operational Planning Guidelines to Support Country Preparedness and Response. These planning guidelines describe priority steps and actions to be included in countries’ preparedness and response plans across the major areas of public health preparedness and response. This is aligned with the previously published COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan (SPRP). By the end of this course, the appointed UNCT lead planners and relevant partners should be able to assess and fill in capability gaps to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Key Learning Objectives

• Be able to educate yourself and others about the importance of operationalizing the SPRP for the COVID-19 outbreak using the Operational Planning Guidelines
• Be able to describe the 8 major pillars of public health preparedness and response and initial actions to be taken by the UN country teams
• Be able to access the full set of actions, performance indicators and resources needed to conduct the preparedness level assessment using the COVID-19 Partners Platform for country preparedness and response plans

Course duration: Approximately 1 hour for Modules 1 and 2 and another hour for Module 3.

Certificates: A Record of Achievement will be available to participants who score 80% or higher in the cumulative course assessment for both Modules 1 and 2. Module 3 is free of any certification.

Course Content

Module 1: Mission and purpose of this program (incl. COVID-19 knowledge):
This module provides a description of the purpose and context for this learning package, leadership words and relevant COVID-19 knowledge.
Module 2: Country-level preparedness and response:
This module provides an introduction to the Operational Planning Guidelines to Support Country Preparedness and Response, and access to relevant information and documentation.
Module 3: Pillars of the public health response:
This module is technical deep dive into each of the 8 pillars of the public health response as described by the Operational Planning Guidelines to Support Country Preparedness and Response.