Systems Thinking Stream

Talk:

Critical Systems Thinking: lessons from the Ebola outbreak for the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the time of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Luis Sambo was Regional Director for Africa at the World Health Organization. He was responsible for leading the response to the outbreak. In this talk, he will look back at his experience with Ebola and will reflect from the perspective of Critical Systems Thinking (CST), on what went wrong and what could have been done better.

Mike Jackson will then take these lessons and apply them to the current COVID-19 epidemic in the UK. Using CST, he will examine the UK health system's lack of preparedness and will analyse the reasons for the failings in the Government’s response to the epidemic. The conclusion will be that CST can help improve the resilience of health systems to potentially catastrophic events, and inform appropriate responses when they do occur.

Presenters:

Meet the esteemed speakers who will deliver an insightful talk on critical systems thinking.

Michael C Jackson, 
Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull, UK

Luis G Sambo, 
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal,

Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull, UK