The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
GCRI · Established platform
Health security and human wellbeing through resilient health systems and cross-sector evidence. Health Nexus is an established platform published by The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation.
On the map below
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Layers 2
Air: haze, smoke, gases and dust
Heat by day and night
Fire, flood and rain
People (exposure context)
3D columns: nexus exposure per hexagon
Keyboard, with the map focused
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NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · Natural Earth
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Haze, nitrogen dioxide, dust, heat by day and night, fires, floods, rain and where people live, from NASA satellites, models and SEDAC, each dated.Environmental exposure indicators as NASA publishes them; no layer shows a health outcome, a disease risk or a warning; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.
Layers and dates
Health security is the protection of populations from acute public health events that threaten health across communities and borders, together with the resilience of the systems that deliver care. Health Nexus studies both as properties of whole systems: hospitals and their power, water, staff and supplies, surveillance and laboratories, environments, and the links between human, animal and ecosystem health. Health authorities decide.
Public health; hospitals; clinicians; One Health scientists; health informatics.
Epidemiological methods; facility continuity; health services access analysis.
Health-system resilience briefs; access maps; One Health evidence.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Health security | The activities that minimise the danger and impact of acute public health events endangering the collective health of populations across regions and borders, in WHO usage. |
| Health system resilience | The capacity of health actors, institutions and populations to prepare for, absorb and recover from shocks while keeping essential services running. |
| One Health | An integrated approach that aims to balance and optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystems, as the Quadripartite organizations define it. |
| International Health Regulations | The legally binding WHO instrument that sets countries' duties to detect, assess, report and respond to public health events of international concern. |
| Health emergency and disaster risk management | The WHO framework for reducing health risks and consequences of emergencies through prevention, preparedness, response and recovery. |
The working screen behind this platform: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Hospitals, staff, power and essential services.
TopicHuman, animal and ecosystem interdependence.
TopicOutbreak readiness, surveillance and uncertainty.
TopicUnequal exposure and access to services.
TopicWater, air, heat, pollution and health.
TopicMedicines, cold chain and health logistics.
TopicData, AI safety and digital infrastructure.
TopicFacility resilience and recovery.
A question becomes evidence, a governed build, an organized community, a controlled test, a reviewed publication and, finally, a decision taken by the competent authority under its own rules.
Fig.The Nexus cycle on this platform, from question to renewal. Design, not a record of a run.
A hospital is a dense knot of dependencies. It needs grid power and backup generation, treated water at pressure, medical gases, a cold chain for vaccines and blood, working information systems, road access for staff and ambulances, and a steady flow of medicines produced in a small number of places. Most of these sit outside the health sector and outside the control of the people who run the hospital.
That is why health crises rarely stay inside health. A heatwave raises admissions while it strains the grid that cools wards. A flood closes the road that night-shift nurses use and contaminates the water a dialysis unit depends on. An outbreak absorbs beds, staff and protective equipment, so that elective surgery, maternal care and chronic disease management are deferred, and the excess harm often appears months later in people who never caught the infection. Shortages in one country's supply of an active ingredient can surface as missing antibiotics in another.
Epidemiology explains who is exposed and how risk is distributed; systems science explains how load, delay and feedback turn local stress into system-wide failure. Health Nexus brings the two together, so that preparedness is judged by whether essential services continue, not only by whether a plan exists.
Health Nexus is designed to produce evidence that health planners, hospital leaders and public health agencies can examine and use under their own authority.
Epidemiological methods, facility continuity analysis and health services access analysis, each with its data and limits stated.
Health-system resilience briefs, access maps and One Health evidence, published as they pass review.
Public health professionals, hospital and clinical leaders, One Health scientists and health informatics specialists.
GCRI does not regulate, certify, license or approve. Health Nexus gives no clinical advice and does not direct care; clinical and public health decisions stay with the competent authorities and providers.
Health Nexus stewards the canonical description of epidemiology and public health science in the STEM Commons. It also applies probability and statistics, complex systems and agent-based modelling, causal inference and impact evaluation, data engineering and stewardship, molecular and life sciences and biotechnology platforms. The STEM foundation page shows how each is used here.
The same field is seen three ways across the Consortium. At The Global Risks Forum (GRF), Health and Biosecurity Governance convenes the institutions that govern health security across borders. At The Global Risks Alliance (GRA), Insurance Nexus builds shared industry understanding of health and catastrophe exposures. Within GCRI, Biotechnology and Biosecurity covers the life-science research side. See counterparts across the Consortium and the health and biosecurity field gateway.
Health Nexus studies health security and human wellbeing as properties of whole systems: hospitals and the power, water, staff and supplies they depend on, surveillance and laboratories, the environments people live in, and the links between human, animal and ecosystem health. Its pages set out the science, the data, the methods and the decisions for each part of that system, with every value labelled by its evidence and every limit stated. It prepares evidence; health authorities decide.
Keeping essential services running through outbreaks, disasters, outages and staff loss, and restoring them afterwards.
The shared health of people, animals and ecosystems: zoonoses, spillover and antimicrobial resistance across sectors.
Detection, assessment and readiness for outbreaks, with reporting delays and uncertainty kept visible.
Unequal exposure, vulnerability and access to care, measured by population group and by place.
Air pollution, heat, unsafe water and chemical exposure as causes of disease and as demand on services.
Medicines, vaccines, diagnostics, oxygen and the cold chain, from manufacturer to facility shelf.
Clinical systems, health data, cyber threats and the algorithms that support clinical and public health decisions.
Facility siting, structural and non-structural safety, functional dependencies and recovery after damage.
Every claim on Health Nexus rests on methods with a canonical page in the STEM Commons, so readers can see what a finding depends on and where its limits lie.
The platform does not set standards. It reads its evidence against the frameworks that competent bodies have adopted, so a finding can be placed where a decision-maker already works.
| Framework or standard | Body | What it sets |
|---|---|---|
| International Health Regulations | World Health Organization (World Health Assembly) | Binding obligations on states to detect, assess, notify and respond to public health events, and the core capacities to do so |
| IHR Monitoring and Evaluation Framework: SPAR and Joint External Evaluation | World Health Organization | Annual self-assessment reporting and voluntary external evaluation of national capacities to prevent, detect and respond |
| Sustainable Development Goal 3 and its indicators | United Nations | Targets and indicator definitions for universal health coverage, financial protection, health workforce and emergency preparedness |
| Sendai Framework and the Bangkok Principles | UNDRR, with WHO | Health in disaster risk reduction, including safe hospitals and multi-hazard health emergency management |
| One Health Joint Plan of Action | FAO, UNEP, WHO and WOAH (the Quadripartite) | Action tracks for zoonoses, antimicrobial resistance, food safety, ecosystems and national One Health capacity |
| Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management Framework | World Health Organization | A common, all-hazards approach to managing health risks of emergencies, from prevention and preparedness to recovery |
| Hospital Safety Index and the Safe Hospitals initiative | WHO and PAHO | Assessment of the structural, non-structural and emergency management safety of health facilities |
| Operational framework for building climate resilient and low carbon health systems | World Health Organization | Components for health systems to anticipate, absorb and recover from climate-related shocks while reducing emissions |
| International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) | World Health Organization | The standard for coding causes of death and disease so that health data are comparable across systems and countries |
| HL7 FHIR | HL7 International | A standard for exchanging health data between systems through defined resources and application interfaces |
GCRI studies a field as science, GRF governs it and GRA builds shared financial understanding of it. Health Nexus links to its counterparts so that work on one side is visible on the others.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.