Coordinating multidisciplinary, rapid support for outbreak response – a conversation with Dr Sharon Salmon, GOARN

Contain This: The Latest in Global Health Security

Our guest this week is Dr Sharon Salmon, technical officer for the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), hosted by the World Health Organization. GOARN is a network of over 250 technical institutions and networks globally that respond to acute public health events with the deployment of staff and resources to affected countries.

Dr. Salmon is based at the Western Pacific Regional Office of WHO working in the emergency management operations of the World Health Emergencies Programme. Prior to this, Dr Salmon worked for the Ministry of Health in Singapore and as a technical officer for WHO in Vietnam and Philippines.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Dr Salmon’s work with GOARN.
• How GOARN operates the importance of partnerships, particularly in the Western Pacific region.
• Some of the challenges GOARN faced in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Reflections on some of Dr Salmon’s deployments to Liberia during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
• The key priorities for GOARN’s recently launched 2022 - 2026 Strategy.

We encourage you to join the conversation on Twitter at @CentreHealthSec. You can also follow GOARN at @WHOGOARN and https://goarn.who.int/