BACKGROUND When disasters occur, humanitarian relief workers frequently deploy to assist in rescue/recovery efforts. AIMS To conduct a systematic review of factors affecting the psychological wellbeing of disaster relief workers and identify recommendations for interventions. METHOD We searched MEDLINE®, Embase, PsycINFO® and Web of Science for relevant studies, supplemented by hand searche...

Pity the poor nongovernmental organizations trying to work in North Korea…It is, by all accounts, a lose-lose situation. 1 Brad Glosserman The Japan Times In this issue of Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, Yim, Choi, and Van Rooyen provide us with a unique glimpse into the sensitivities and complexities surrounding the delivery of humanitarian aid in North Korea and the compelling struggle tha...

Background: The number of disasters affecting the world has climbed dramatically over previous decade, from around 220 per year in mid-1990s to 350–400 now. rising frequency natural calamities encouraged author conduct a study on humanitarian logistics (HL) and its role mitigating consequences any disaster incidence. Thus, this aims outline issues challenges HL relief.Objectives: purpose is emp...

Afghanistan is in the midst of a profound humanitarian crisis resulting primarily from long-standing armed conflict, a devastating drought, and massive population migration. The economy, government, and health care system are in shambles. Currently, as many as 5 million Afghans are in camps either as refugees in neighboring countries or as internally displaced persons within Afghanistan. Much o...

Against the backdrop of over two hundred thousand people dead or missing and millions of people homeless after China’s massive earthquake and Myanmar devastating cyclone, forecasts estimate that natural and manmade disasters are likely to increase five-fold both in number and impact over the next 50 years. Hence, the need for disaster relief provided by humanitarian organizations during disaste...

Last mile distribution is the final stage of a humanitarian relief chain; it refers to delivery of relief supplies from local distribution centers (LDCs) to beneficiaries affected by disasters. In this study, we consider a vehicle-based last mile distribution system, in which an LDC stores and distributes emergency relief supplies to a number of demand locations. The main decisions are allocati...

Humanitarian relief logistics is one of the most important elements of a relief operation in disaster management. The present work develops a multi-objective robust stochastic programming approach for disaster relief logistics under uncertainty. In our approach, not only demands but also supplies and the cost of procurement and transportation are considered as the uncertain parameters. Furtherm...

Since the end of the Cold War, states have increasingly come under pressure to intervene militarily and, in fact, have intervened militarily to protect citizens other than their own from humanitarian disasters. Recent efforts to enforce protected areas for Kurds and no-fly zones over Shiites in Iraq, efforts to alleviate starvation and establish some kind of political order in Somalia, the huge...

The USNS Mercy, one of the two hospital ships in the United States Navy, has provided disaster relief and humanitarian assistance for multiple natural disasters around the world. As a self-sustaining 1000-bed hospital, the USNS Mercy provides a full complement of surgical and medical capabilities to care for the sick and injured in a mobile platform environment. This article describes the recen...