Safeguarding public health at UK airports: an examination of current health security practices

Budd, Lucy; Warren, Adam P.; Bell, Morag

doi:10.1080/03081060.2011.530827

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…The daily practice of airport health security, however, involves a complex collaboration between local police, medical practitioners, environmental health officers, airline and airport staff, local Primary Care Trusts (a division of the National Health Service in England that provides some primary and/or community healthcare services), and national security, immigration, and health services (including, but not limited to, private security contractors, the UK Border Agency, the British Transport Police and the UK’s Health Protection Agency) (Health Protection Agency 2006). This institutional and legislative framework is further complicated by the fact that different agencies discharge their responsibilities in different ways at different airports according to the physical limitations and operational characteristics of the individual airports concerned (see Budd et al 2011).…”

Section: The Development Of Sanitary Regulations For Aviationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, we suggest that while it is relatively easy for immigration officers to identify passengers arriving on direct flights from particular destinations, there are no mechanisms through which passengers who may have originated in a high‐risk country but transited through an intermediate hub can be identified. Hence, a body originating in a known endemic disease area can, simply by virtue of its route through the global airline network, enter the UK without additional health checks (Budd et al 2011). As Horner astutely remarked, ‘the degree of health surveillance is determined not by medical need but by the capriciousness of the route into the country selected by the traveller himself’ (1974, 101).…”

Section: Regulating Aeromobile Bodies: Public Health Interventions Atmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Maintaining the sanitary border: air transport liberalisation and health security practices at UK regional airports

Budd

Bell²,

Warren³

2011

Trans Inst British Geog

Self Cite

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This paper contributes to ongoing debates surrounding the governance and security of global mobility regimes through a theoretical and empirical examination of the extent to which air transport liberalisation and contemporary practices of infectious disease governance demand a re‐conceptualisation of national borders. Recent outbreaks of SARS and H1N1 influenza, which spread rapidly around the world via air travel, illustrated the ability of pathogens to disrupt patterns and practices of human mobility and directly led to the introduction of new health screening technologies at airports that were designed to restrict the spread of infection and maintain a sanitary border. Yet while medical specialists have debated the effectiveness of the various screening techniques, and privacy campaigners have expressed concern over some of the technologies that have been deployed in an attempt to intercept these disease threats, there has been no exploration of the extent to which recent regulatory and structural changes within the global aviation industry have exacerbated the challenges of safeguarding public health and simultaneously transformed practices and spatialities of sanitary border control by re‐siting national borders within a range of offshore and domestic locations. Drawing on official airport passenger statistics from the UK, this paper contends that, in transforming the spatialities of contemporary patterns of aeromobility, the progressive liberalisation of the commercial aviation sector (and the dramatic rise in passenger numbers, flights and airports handling international services it effected) – has had unintended and hitherto unexplored consequences for the governance of infectious disease mobility and the material deployment of sovereign sanitary territoriality by creating more points through which an infectious disease may enter or leave a country and moving the border inside UK regions.

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Section: The Development Of Sanitary Regulations For Aviationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Regulating Aeromobile Bodies: Public Health Interventions Atmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maintaining the sanitary border: air transport liberalisation and health security practices at UK regional airports

Budd

Bell²,

Warren³

2011

Trans Inst British Geog

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Despite increasing efforts to guide preparedness at POE 1–4 and despite international regulations aiming to safeguard the capacity for an international response, 5 6 POE had difficulty to respond timely and effectively to internationally spreading diseases in the past. 7–10 …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite increasing efforts to guide preparedness at POE [1][2][3][4] and despite international regulations aiming to safeguard the capacity for an international response, 5 6 POE had difficulty to respond timely and effectively to internationally spreading diseases in the past. [7][8][9][10] Responding effectively to emerging infectious disease threats at POE is difficult, as their occurrence is mostly unpredictable and scarce. The probability that a single POE has to deal with a serious event is generally low.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting ready to act: theorising a stepwise transition into crisis response at points of entry based on interviews with COVID-19 responders and a military preparedness framework

et al. 2023

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IntroductionPoints of entry (POE) have an important role in timely national response to infectious diseases threats. However, a guiding framework is lacking for the transition from generic preparedness into optimally specified response for an imminent infectious disease threat, a step called ‘operational readiness’.ObjectiveWe aim to contribute to the conceptual closure of this preparedness–response gap for infectious disease control at POE by providing content to the operational readiness concept.DesignWe first explored the NATO Combat Readiness (NCR) concept for its applicability on infectious disease control at POE, as the military discipline faces the same need of being flexible in preparing for unknown threats. Concepts of the NCR that support the transition into response to a specific threat were integrated into the operational readiness concept. To explore the added value of the concept in practice, we conducted and analysed semistructured interviews of professionals at European POE (n=24) responsible for the early COVID-19 response.ResultsBased on the NCR, operational readiness builds on the fact that activating the response capabilities and capacities to a specific threat requires time. For professionals at POE, the transition from generic preparedness into the COVID-19 response led to challenges in specifying response plans, dealing with an overload of information, while experiencing shortages of public health staff. These challenges could be covered within operational readiness by defining the time and the specific staging needed to upgrade response capabilities and capacities.DiscussionWe conclude that a guiding framework for operational readiness seems appropriate in relation to the many activities and challenges POE have had to face during the COVID-19 response. Operational readiness is mainly defined by the time dimension required to deploy the response to a specific threat. However, integrating this conceptual framework into practice requires structural and sustainable investments in outbreak preparedness.

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“…Moving beyond the example of hospitals, research has also been conducted with regard to the health‐related internal organization and monitoring of airports (Budd, Bell, et al, 2011; Klauser et al, 2008; Ali & Keil, 2009; Budd, Warren, et al, 2011), psychiatric hospitals (Meyer et al, 2012), into the internal logics of quarantined areas (Gensini et al, 2004) and other spaces of containment more generally (Parry, 2012).…”

Section: Internal Organization and Monitoring Of Spatial Enclavesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for the right balance between openness and closure: Spatial logics of crisis management and control in the policy response to pandemic disease such as COVID‐19

Klauser

Pauschinger

2022

Contingencies & Crisis Mgmt

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This paper argues that at its very core, the policy response to a pandemic such as COVID‐19 is shaped by the search for the right balance between openness and closure, mobility and public safety. More specifically, drawing upon relevant social‐scientific literatures and examples relating to the fight against COVID‐19 in Switzerland, the paper highlights three broad and fundamentally intertwined spatial logics of control and restriction through which differing degrees and modalities of closure and openness are being articulated in the context of infectious disease. These refer to (1) border and access control; (2) the monitoring of people and objects on the move and (3) to the internal organization and monitoring of specific spatial enclaves. The three spatial logics of crisis management and control offer an exploratory framework, the paper argues, to study the functioning and implications of outbreak response both during and after the pandemic.

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Safeguarding public health at UK airports: an examination of current health security practices

Cited by 4 publications

References 32 publications

Maintaining the sanitary border: air transport liberalisation and health security practices at UK regional airports

Maintaining the sanitary border: air transport liberalisation and health security practices at UK regional airports

Getting ready to act: theorising a stepwise transition into crisis response at points of entry based on interviews with COVID-19 responders and a military preparedness framework

Searching for the right balance between openness and closure: Spatial logics of crisis management and control in the policy response to pandemic disease such as COVID‐19

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