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Commentary
The Global Health Security Index: what value does it add?
  1. Ahmed Razavi,
  2. Ngozi A Erondu,
  3. Ebere Okereke
  1. International Health Regulations Strengthening Project, Public Health England, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Ahmed Razavi; ahmed.razavi{at}nhs.net

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-002477

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    Summary box

    • The Global Health Security Index (GHSI) is a new tool that can be used to assess a country’s global health security.

    • It uses open-source information to establish how each of the 195 International Health Regulations signatory countries meet 85 subindicators across six categories.

    • The process is comprehensive; however, questions remain over the skew of indicators towards the priorities of high-income countries, the validity of some indicators, the scoring system and its weighting, and how the GHSI adds value to existing assessments of global health security.

    • We recommend avoiding using the scoring to determine priorities and compare countries with one another.

    The Global Health Security Index (GHSI) claims to be ‘the first comprehensive assessment and benchmarking of health security and related capabilities across the 195 countries that make up the States Parties to the International Health Regulations (IHR)’.1 It is funded by the Open Philanthropy Project, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Robertson Foundation. The work itself was conducted by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit, hereafter referred to as ‘the GHSI team’. Amidst the several other existing global health security assessment tools available, we critically review whether the GHSI adds value to the existing suite of tools for improved global health security.

    Evaluation of compliance with the legal requirements of the IHR2 was initially based exclusively on country self-reporting. Assessments were undertaken using the IHR Self-Assessment Annual Reporting (SPAR) tool.3 Following the West African Ebola epidemic in 2014–2016, recommendations were made by the IHR review committee to strengthen assurance of IHR compliance.4 In 2015, the 68th World Health Assembly recommended5 expanding the approach to assessing IHR compliance and developed the Monitoring and …

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