A Knowledge Management System for health emergencies: facilitating knowledge continuity and timely decision-making for frontline responders using experiential knowledge captured during action reviews (27 August 2024)

Summary

The COVID-19 global pandemic has further exposed a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. The pandemic heightened the importance of accessing, processing, and disseminating available critical knowledge to guide emergency response actions to events in dynamic and uncertain times.

At the center of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis has been the crisis of knowledge failure which countries have been maneuvering to remedy. Knowledge failures are not unique to the COVID-19 pandemic; they have also been evident during responses to past public health emergencies including previous coronavirus epidemics [i.e., the 2003 coronavirus causing severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS-CoV, the 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV)] and the 2018 Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

This paper looks at current knowledge management practices.