Plenary sessions

The thread connecting all plenary sessions

DPH2026 takes place six years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Far enough to assess what has genuinely changed, and close enough that the urgency of “next time” remains real. 

Lack of data for public health, their interpretability and access needs to be thought about and well planned when designing healthcare systems and data collection processes, to ensure equity, representativeness and quality are embedded. The systems must include data on hard to reach populations as as well as from those who out out form public healthcare for private options. 

Each of the three plenary sessions approaches this moment from a different vantage point: 

• Session 1 asks what institutional and legislative conditions Europe must put in place to ensure it can act autonomously in a crisis; 
• Session 2 asks whether the One Health partnerships and preparedness frameworks promised after COVID have taken root in practice; and 
• Session 3 asks which of the digital and data technologies that emerged or were stress-tested during the pandemic are now mature enough to operate at population scale. 

The sessions are therefore deliberately sequential in logic: sovereignty sets the enabling conditions, preparedness frameworks translate those conditions into operational structures, and technical tools are the instruments those structures deploy. Panellists across all three sessions are invited to orient their contributions around three shared questions: what lessons from COVID-19 have been durably absorbed, where do we stand today, and what must still be built before the next pandemic arrives.

Speakers

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