In 2005, members of the World Health Organisation (WHO) adopted the International Health Regulations (IHR 2005), which requires states to develop certain minimum core public health capacities. The Joint External Evaluation (JEE) tool was developed in 2015 as a voluntary and collaborative process to assess country capacity to prevent, detect and respond to public health threats, and help member states meet the goals of IHR 2005.

Along with scores rating a country's capacity in different technical areas, the JEE reports include recommendations for priority actions, which are recommendations from the external assessment team to improve the nation's health capacity. Since these priority actions are qualitative descriptions, they are not standardized across countries.

To learn more about WHO's Joint External Evaluations (JEE), visit their website: http://www.who.int/ihr/procedures/mission-reports/en/

Here, we develop an open-source tool to analyze priority actions and identify topics among recommendations across countries. We analyze the priority actions from the 58 reports.

This analysis will support technical experts and international donors in identifying high impact activities that can be undertaken or funded to effectively strengthen the capacity of nations to prevent, detect and respond to health emergencies.