Health crises often arise from unforeseen circumstances, but if we can understand what makes healthcare systems vulnerable and how to prepare, we can minimize their impact. We’ve identified five public health crises that are ripe for prevention:

Mental Health Crisis

A mental health crisis is a sudden negative change in your emotional or physical health, and can include symptoms such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and more. It can also be triggered by life events such as relationship issues, substance abuse, suicide, or a sudden loss of job, family or financial security.

Chronic illness crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought attention to long-standing inequities in healthcare access and outcomes, especially among communities of color, people with disabilities and those with lower incomes. These inequities are made worse during a crisis, with hospitals forced to focus virtually all their resources on a single threat and neglect other areas of care.

A crisis is also a time of confusion and misinformation, with conflicting messages from scientists, the government and international news media including social media platforms. This has led to a decline in trust in all sources of information and a growing distrust for the medical community and government agencies. This can lead to a lack of confidence in and adherence to mass vaccination programs, which may have consequences for public health well beyond their immediate effects on infection rates. This, in turn, may undermine national healthcare emergency planning efforts.