International organisations in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic and their impact on public health

This article investigates and provides an overview of the role of international organisations: Caritas Internationalis, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Health Organisation. It explores the steps these organisations have taken to protect the health of people and mitigate the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic by means of: distributing food, soap, masks, gloves, providing medical equipment, helping people get vaccinated, performing COVID-19 tests, reaching people with WASH services, promoting psychological well-being, and providing people with reliable information. The work also focuses on exploring the factors influencing public trust in those organisations (in this case the WHO), such as age, gender and nationality. The collected data are processed using statistical methods. As the quantitative analysis suggests, the WHO’s impact on the decisions and opinions of the society was differentiated. Some trends could be observed, but the correlation between the percentage of the surveyed citizens who think that the WHO has done a good job dealing with the coronavirus outbreak in certain countries and the amount of money contributed in total until 2022 to the WHO COVID-19 Response Fund by their countries turned out to be statistically significant. Based on the sources found, it can be stated that international organisations undertake numerous actions, whose aim is to improve health and limit the negative impact of the pandemic that influences the physical and mental health of the population. Their impact, however, may be restricted, while the information spread by them does not have an effect on everyone, which is caused by many factors.