Singapore contributes to regional health emergency readiness through its first Emergency Medical Team classification

Singapore's Emergency Medical Team (EMT), known as SGEMT, today joined the ranks of quality-assured EMT, prepared for self-sufficient and high-quality response to a wide range of health emergencies. This builds on years of work by Singapore's government to support emergency response regionally and globally. The classification followed two days of intense evaluation by a team of expert peer reviewers from EMTs in China and Thailand, along with EMT experts from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Ensuring that Singapore is now able to deploy emergency responders to outbreaks or emergency events anywhere in the world, reflects the country's commitment to advancing health security. SGEMT's operational readiness reflects a whole-of-government effort that involves collaboration across multiple departments: health services, crisis strategy and operations, foreign affairs, military and civil defence forces.

WHO's EMT Global Classification is a quality assurance mechanism, using external peer review to assess compliance against international principles and standards. The process ensures that emergency medical teams are composed of trained team members, have appropriate equipment, are fully self-sufficient, and are well-integrated within national health systems when deployed for emergency response. This mechanism enables safe and high-quality medical care to be provided during public health emergencies are well-integrated within local health systems. This quality assurance mechanism enables the highest quality of medical care to be administered during any public health emergency.

Enabling a network of emergency workforce across borders<_o3a_p>

Members of classified emergency medical teams form an integral part of the global health emergency workforce,comprising a network of trained and equipped emergency responders that can surge when required and requested by affected countries. The EMT Initiative, hosted by WHO, aligns with global efforts to standardize quality and enhance interoperability between national, regional, and global emergency workforce capacities.

EMT classification advances WHO's Global Health Emergency Corps (GHEC) vision of a trained health emergency workforce centred in countries and coordinated regionally, as well as globally. GHEC provides a uniformly trained and globally connected emergency workforce corps that can effectively respond, as one cohesive unit, during a health emergency. <_o3a_p><_o3a_p>

Reiterating the value of global health emergency corps, Dr Saia Ma'u Piukala, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific, noted: "In our interconnected world, efforts to build national emergency workforce capacities, simultaneously advance global health security. Initiatives like Emergency Medical Teams, ensure that countries are ready to respond with their own national emergency workforce during an emergency, and that they can access trusted networks of emergency responders across borders, when required."

The COVID-19 pandemic drove home the need for all countries to have emergency response capacities, a highly trained national workforce and access to essential technology and equipment. Through the Global Health Emergency Corps (GHEC) collaborations between emergency medical teams and other emergency response networks like Rapid Response teams and the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) expand countries' capacities to diagnose faster and treat quicker.<_o3a_p><_o3a_p>

With the classification of the Singapore EMT, the Western Pacific now hosts 13 of 40 internationally classified EMTs, and national teams have been developed in every Member State across the Region, from Mongolia in the far north to New Zealand in the south, and in both the largest and smallest countries. Rabindra Abeyasinghe, WHO Representative to Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, and Singapore, who attended the EMT verification process shared: "EMTs form a crucial resource for countries in the Western Pacific and the world at large that require deployable clinical capacity to reach remote and emergency-affected communities." EMTs in the Region have supported multiple emergency response efforts, including for COVID-19, measles outbreaks, cyclones, earthquakes and even a volcanic eruption and tsunami. <_o3a_p>

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.