Pandemic preparedness
Public Health and Policy
Definition. Pandemic preparedness is the set of plans, capacities and resources that enable health systems and societies to detect, respond to and recover from pandemics.
Explanation
Preparedness covers surveillance, stockpiles, surge capacity, workforce, communication and governance. At hospital level, non-structural preparedness can be improved through structured quality methods such as FOCUS-PDCA (Basiri et al., 2024).
COVID-19 exposed gaps in many systems, reinforcing the link between preparedness and resilience.
Related concepts
Health system resilience Disaster preparedness Global health PDSA cycle
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References
Basiri, A., Farajzadeh, M. A., Belal, M., & Heidaranlu, E. (2024). Improving the non-structural preparedness of the selected hospital based on the FOCUS-PDCA model: Action research. BMC Emergency Medicine, 24(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12873-024-01006-w
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Pandemic preparedness. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/pandemic-preparedness/
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