Webinar: Experiences managing COVID-19 in prisons and future planning
17 December 2020, 15:00 – 17:00 CET
As part of the global response to COVID-19 pandemic, WHO Health in Prison Programme (WHO HIPP) issued the Interim Guidance on Preparedness, Prevention and Control of COVID-19 in Prisons and Other Places of Detention. The Guidance established a technical roadmap for prison administrations and healthcare practitioners in the context of COVID-19 and addressed several technical areas including human rights, preparedness, contingency planning, and level of risk, training and education, risk communication, prevention measures and case management.
To support countries in the implementation of the Guidance, WHO HIPP published a Checklist for self-assessment of recommendations, targeting policy makers, prison administrators and healthcare clinicians working in prisons. WHO HIPP invited countries to share their responses through an online submission form. The analysis of these shared submissions enabled WHO to support national stakeholders in assessing the response to COVID-19 to prevent COVID-19 from entering in prisons, to capture standards in place, mitigate risks and identify Member States’ needs for WHO support.
The primary purpose of this webinar was to:
- present the collective main findings from countries that shared their Checklist responses with WHO, discuss limitations of the captured data and ways forward;
- elaborate on countries responses to the resurgence of COVID-19 in prisons, highlighting similarities and differences in their initial response between March and July 2020;
- discuss lessons learned on the preparedness, prevention, control, and management of COVID-19 in prisons over the course of the pandemic;
- raise awareness about the importance of data generation and sharing, and on development of research to inform policy and way forward.
