After action review

An After Action Review (AAR) is a qualitative review of actions taken to respond to a public health event or following a project or a public health intervention as a means of identifying and documenting best practices demonstrated and challenges encountered during the response to the event or the implementation of the project. The AAR process involves a structured facilitated discussion or experience sharing among responders to critically and systematically review what was in place before the response and could have been used, what actually happened during the response, what went well, what went less well, why events occurred as they did, and how to improve. It is an important management tool for continuous performance improvement and learning.

More specifically, the objectives of an AAR are:

• to review actions undertaken at each phase of managing a public health event, to identify what worked well, what worked less well and why;
• to demonstrate the functionality of national capacities in preparing for, detecting and responding to a public health event;
• to identify the corrective actions needed to institutionalize any lessons emerging from the management of public health events;
• to address the challenges made evident through the AAR.