The revised International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) are a set of legal instruments designed to ensure and improve the capacity of all signatories or States Parties to prevent, detect, assess, notify, and respond to public health risks and acute events. Under the IHR 2005, States Parties are obliged to develop and maintain minimum core capacities for surveillance and response to any potential public health events of international concern. The success of the IHR in ensuring global public health security depends on their full application, implementation, and compliance by all States Parties.

States Parties and the Director-General report to the World Health Assembly on the implementation of the IHR. States Parties use a self-assessment tool for their annual reporting called the IHR States Parties Self-Assessment Annual Reporting Tool or SPAR. The SPAR tool consists of 35 indicators for the 15 IHR capacities needed to detect, assess, notify, report and respond to public health risks and acute events of domestic and international concern. For each of the 15 capacities, one to three indicators are used to measure the status of each capacity. Indicators are further broken down into attributes, which further define the indicator at each level. SPAR questionnaire is launched every year after the World Health Assembly for States Parties to initiate the process of self-assessment and reporting to the World Health Assembly, using a multisectoral approach to obtain information from all sectors involved in implementing IHR core capacities.