An open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution license, which discusses how epidemics continue to pose a significant public health threat to populations in low and middle-income countries. The article discusses the appropriateness and performance of response interventions in such settings and undertook a rapid scoping review of public health evaluation frameworks for emergency settings in order to judge their suitability for assessing epidemic response. The search identified a large variety of frameworks, of which many are not suitable for framing the response to an epidemic, or its evaluation and the authors then propose a generic epidemic framework that draws on elements of existing frameworks.