One should keep in mind that another pandemic may not take the form of a respiratory virus. Ebola attacks the circulatory system, so respirators would be of little use. It could also be a bacteria, parasite, or fungus, attacking other parts of the human body.
With that in mind, there are generic safeguards that any government would be wise to put in place to do better at containing an infectious pathogen before it becomes a full pandemic.
International alert system. We can't bring the world to a halt every time something new crops up, but we can assess new pathogens as to the likelihood of them spreading quickly. The international community can also consider stiff economic penalties for any nation that fails to issue an alert in a timely manner, to encourage disclosure.
Travel freeze. Most nations did this eventually, but a faster activation, and more attentiveness to the need for a travel freeze, can contain the spread, especially with the high level of international travel today. Note that the 1918 Spanish flu spread widely because so many soldiers were going back home at the end of the war, an unusually high level of international travel for that time.
Fast tracking research and countermeasures. The majority of nations tend to have a lengthy drug and treatment approval process, for patient safety. With an imminent pandemic and the high number of affected people, the possibility of mass illness or death mandates a faster approval process to address that specific situation. In that case, mass illness outweighs the need to go slow for new but not desperately needed treatments.
All of those can be put in place without a huge expenditure.
Building a lot of hospitals is expensive, keeping them operational is also very expensive. Assuming a period of at least several years until another infectious pathogen arises, extra hospitals are likely to fall into disuse, or be deactivated due to budget constraints.
An interesting possibility was demonstrated when the US Navy proposed moving one of its two large hospital ships to New York harbor, to help deal with the COVID-19 epidemic.
An internationally funded effort to build a few large hospital ships can result in state of the art treatment being available where an outbreak occurs, within a few days. A moveable hospital, to contain an infectious pathogen before it goes international. When not dealing with a pandemic, those ships can be employed assisting nations that have poor health care.