COVID-19 Live Briefing: Secondary Health Impacts on the World's Most Vulnerable Children

About

Tune in to hear our panel of experts discuss the secondary impacts of COVID-19 on children's health, particularly for the most vulnerable, due to the disruption of life saving health services and weakened or fragile health systems. Join us as we examine the situation on the ground and explore how we, as a global community, can “build back better” from COVID-19 with an emphasis on health systems strengthening.

Panelists: 

Luwei Pearson has been the Acting Associate Director of the Health Programme at UNICEF HQ since 2016. Luwei is a pediatrician with a master’s degree in public health, and she started her career with UNICEF in China in 1988. She served UNICEF in several duty stations including: China, Pakistan, Nepal, East and Southern Africa based in Nairobi Kenya, Ethiopia and New York. Her expertise has been evolving with a keen focus on maternal, newborn and child health programs, and primary health care systems.

Emily D. Carter, PhD, is an Assistant Scientist at the Institute for International Programs at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Her research aims to strengthen public health programs and policies through improved measurement of intervention coverage and health impact. Her work focuses on improving the availability and quality of data for public health decision-makers in low- and middle-income countries.

Currently, Emily’s focus is on developing methods for linking household and health care provider assessments for estimating intervention coverage, including geospatial techniques for combining data sets. She also works on estimating intervention impact through mortality modeling and direct estimation from survey data. Emily is also a contributing author the recently released report published in the Lancet Global Health Journal focused on the potential secondary impacts of COVID-19.

Savitha Subramanian is a Senior Program Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focused on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health. Savitha has over fifteen years of experience as a public health professional implementing and evaluating global health projects. Her aim is to use innovative methods for designing, implementing and evaluating high impact interventions that focus on health system strengthening to improve service delivery for mothers and children globally.

Her technical experience includes improving service delivery of maternal and child health, family planning, and nutrition services, strengthening supply chain systems and building routine health information systems to improve the quality and use of data for decision making. Savitha has worked across Asia and Africa in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Zambia.