The number of people employed in international humanitarian care is growing at a yearly rate of 6%. The demand for better coordination, accountability, and training has led to a need for standardized humanitarian training programs for providers. Training should be based on comprehensive core competencies that providers must demonstrate in addition to their skill-specific competencies. This repo...

Research on performance measurement in humanitarian supply chains is scant. Experiences with developing performance measures in commercial environments show that it is particularly important to understand linkages between higher level goals and performance measurement, for example through using strategy maps in for-profit organisations or mission maps in non-profit organisations. In this articl...

BACKGROUND The impact of humanitarian disasters upon mental health is well recognised. The evidence for psychological interventions for mental health is mounting, but few interventions have been rigorously tested in humanitarian settings. To be sustainable in humanitarian settings interventions need to be short, simple, deliverable by nonspecialists under supervision, and adopt a transdiagnosti...

INTRODUCTION This paper aims to raise awareness regarding ethical issues in the context of humanitarian action, and to offer a framework for systematically and effectively addressing such issues. METHODS Several cases highlight ethical issues that humanitarian aid workers are confronted with at different levels over the course of their deployments. The first case discusses a situation at a ma...

The concept of protecting civilians in armed conflict is enshrined in international humanitarian law and widely acknowledged in humanitarian norms. Making this concept operational in humanitarian service delivery is a challenge. Yet, there are many ways in which humanitarian workers could learn from local people about underlying tensions in their community and with these new insights adjust ser...

The literature on evidence-based action in humanitarian crises commonly focuses on how inter-and non-governmental organisations can produce better knowledge and how this can be translated into improved programming. Yet, there is little recorded experience of, or concern about, how the beneficiaries of humanitarian relief can produce and use knowledge of their predicament. This paper is based on...

Cities are fast becoming new territories of violence. The humanitarian consequences of many criminally violent urban settings are comparable to those of more traditional wars, yet despite the intensity of the needs, humanitarian aid to such settings is limited. The way in which humanitarian needs are typically defined, fails to address the problems of these contexts, the suffering they produce ...

In this article I set out an agenda of good practice for today's humanitarian practitioner. I first outline the distinctive political and conflict-related features of today's complex political emergencies, and the new interventionist strategies of the international community and the United Nations in responding to them. From this description of the new operating environment faced by humanitaria...

Timely and accurate processing of crisis information and effective communication have been documented as critical elements of disaster relief operations. Despite the lessons learned from previous crises, preparing information for humanitarian assistance and ineffective information sharing remain a recurring and almost impossible task for relief agencies. The purpose of this paper is to propose ...

The medical mission field is an innovative setting for training and evaluating health care professional students. The motivating factor of serving indigent populations as a means of a humanitarian, or oftentimes a spiritual act, makes medical missions an attractive option for student participation. At the Gregory School of Pharmacy, medical mission teams are an integral part of the pharmacy pro...