ABW Café Series: Optimization in Public Health – Examples from the Field

Whereas optimization in healthcare is well established supporting, for example, scheduling challenges, applications in public health are scarce; this is even more acute in public health emergencies. In this talk, Victor will be first providing examples of approaches to processes and systems mapping in public health settings to aid decision making. From such essential descriptive efforts he will then cover a few examples of optimization challenges and approaches. Examples cover the optimization of laboratory networks, disease surveillance streams and disease control capacities. Victor will end with some reflections on the operationalization of efforts during outbreak time.

Victor is a senior epidemiologist with the Public Health Rapid Support Team, UK Health Security Agency. In this capacity he gets deployed to support outbreak response efforts internationally. Previously, Victor has worked in health emergencies in southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Americas with WHO and other international programmes.