Adapting L4UHC to a COVID world

COVID-19 hasn’t just created practical restrictions on our ability to deliver our normal L4UHC programme, notably through travel bans and social distancing requirements, it has also changed participating countries’ UHC pressure points and priorities. And we’re adapting our programme to ease those pressures, and to find smart, practical solutions to the challenges of meeting face-to-face.

Our immediate priority is to provide rapid support country teams to help them address the short- and medium-term challenges of managing the virus’s impacts. Our thinking on these issues is developing rapidly, and not yet finalised, but some of the solutions being considered include: 

• Creating a series of fast, flexible ‘just-in-time’ modules to help country teams address pressing leadership issues. For instance, what are the most important human competencies needed right now, and how can they be developed? And what frameworks can be used to prevent decision-making and progress freezing up under the stresses and strains of responding to the virus? These modules are likely to be small and easily digested and actioned.

• Providing on-the-ground support through our country coaches and P4H focal points, complemented by virtual support from other international specialists, taking into account internet bandwidth constraints in certain countries.

• Connecting past and present participating countries so that they can share and learn from each others’ experiences in managing initiatives to tackle COVID-19.

Other options are being considered. We’ll keep you posted of developments. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions of the type of support you would like from L4UHC, get in touch with us at info@l4uhc.org.