The World Health Organization has named Dr. Vanessa Kerry its special envoy for health resilience, giving the global health physician a new platform to push for stronger local medical systems and better preparation for emergencies. Kerry, 49, says resilience means having the basics in place before a crisis: capable health workers, primary care and the ability to respond. She argues that aid too often follows individual diseases or emergencies, rather than building systems that can handle multiple threats. “We’ve been funding disease by disease and crisis by crisis,” she said. “We can be thinking about this differently.” The appointment builds on Kerry’s work as the first WHO special envoy for climate change and health, her role directing global health and climate policy at Harvard’s School of Public Health, and her leadership of Seed Global Health. The nonprofit has spent more than a decade training health workers in lower-resource countries. Its earlier collaboration with the Peace Corps, from 2012 to 2018, supported country-led efforts to control HIV/AIDS. Kerry points to Uganda as an example of that model. Seed partnered with the country’s health ministry to train 30 emergency medicine physicians. During an Ebola outbreak there earlier this year, she said, those physicians and other specialists helped train more than 3,000 health workers in case management and infection prevention. Her focus on long-term training followed a frightening experience in Rwanda during medical school. Asked to assist a nurse with a difficult delivery, Kerry helped manage a case in which the baby’s shoulder was stuck. Mother and child survived, but Kerry said the episode exposed the danger of having too few trained staff and limited resources. It helped inspire Seed’s emphasis on building local capacity rather than relying mainly on visiting medical teams. As envoy, Kerry says she wants to ensure funding is available for countries to address their most pressing health burdens, while giving local leaders a meaningful role in setting priorities. She said a nation without health infrastructure is unlikely to be ready for an emergency, making preparedness a matter of building capacity before a crisis arrives.