Introduction
The Global Health Security Index (GHS Index) is a project by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, with methodological, research, and analytical support from The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). An International Panel of Experts, convened by the project team, provided guidance and feedback on the development of the GHS Index framework. Members of the International Panel of Experts provided advice over the course of the GHS Index’s development and participated in their personal capacities or in their capacities as representatives of advising organizations.” The inaugural iteration of the GHS Index was generously funded by the Open Philanthropy Project, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Robertson Foundation.
The GHS Index is the first comprehensive assessment of health security and related capabilities across the 195 countries that make up the States Parties to the International Health Regulations (IHR (2005)). It promotes meaningful multisectoral engagement to complement existing processes for national health security needs assessment, prioritisation, planning and financing, and is a tool for measuring country capacities to prevent, detect and respond to naturally occurring, accidental and deliberate infectious disease threats. Building on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Joint External Evaluation (JEE) tool, the GHS Index also assesses health system preparedness for high-consequence outbreaks, as well as socioeconomic and political risk factors that modulate vulnerability to epidemic threats. The inaugural GHS Index, released in 2019, found that no country is sufficiently prepared for epidemics or pandemics.1
COVID-19 and other recent outbreaks—such as H1N1 pandemic influenza, Ebola, Nipah and Zika, among others—underscore the importance of measuring and monitoring country progress towards building robust capacities for preventing, detecting and responding to known, emerging and re-emerging infectious disease threats.2 These outbreaks have also underscored challenges in measuring global health security capacities. Some analyses, for example, have recently highlighted discrepancies observed in countries like the USA and the UK, which received high GHS Index and JEE Scores, yet struggle to suppress cases of COVID-19.3 4
Here, we (1) describe the practical value of the GHS Index; (2) present potential use cases to help policymakers and practitioners maximise the utility of the tool; (3) discuss the importance of scoring and ranking; (4) describe the robust methodology underpinning country scores and ranks; (5) highlight the GHS Index’s emphasis on transparency and (6) articulate caveats for users wishing to use GHS Index data in health security research, policymaking and practice.