 The authors would like to thank the European Agency for Reconstruction for access to their data and their kind support. ABSTRACT Different procurement decisions taken by relief organizations can result in considerably different implications in regards to transport, storage, and distribution of humanitarian aid and ultimately can influence the performance of the humanitarian supply chain and t...

OBJECTIVE To explore the characteristics, motivations, ideologies, experience and perspectives of experienced medical humanitarian workers. DESIGN We applied a qualitative descriptive approach and conducted in-depth semistructured interviews, containing open-ended questions with directing probes, with 44 experienced international medical aid workers from a wide range of humanitarian organisat...

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...

Resource Allocation (RAlloc) is one of the most important tasks in organizing humanitarian response to humanitarian crises. It is not only that adequate and efficient RAlloc save lives and reduce damages caused by humanitarian crises, but RAlloc must be fast and efficient to save time and resources. Given that RAlloc is a type of a decision making process, it is expected that decision on RAlloc...

The management of humanitarian logistical operations was for many years the weak link in the relief chain. Within the advent of big data, this challenge has been changing life and the way of dealing in the humanitarian field. Data is increasing exponentially due to the growing digitization of modern life and the further evolution of data collection in combination with the digital technology. Mo...

The success of humanitarian relief efforts is contingent upon the quality and timeliness of information provided to both the decision making and coordinating functions. Poor or fragmented information can lead to inappropriate decisions or poorly coordinated activities. This research focuses on how the application of spatially aware technologies can allow the information dimension of the challen...

Disasters trigger the need for relief items. The flows of relief items to the beneficiaries in the disaster area are determined by humanitarian logistics networks. The setup and operations of such networks can be supported by employing Operations Research models. Several models, based on different methodologies are available to support decision-making in the field of humanitarian logistics. Thi...

In this paper, we investigate the possible impact of crowdsourcing on organisational practices. We answer the research question of whether and to what extent the practices of crowdmapping impact humanitarian organisations. To answer this question, we examine a crowdmapping initiative during a natural disaster. The data collection is based on forty interviews with different actors including crow...

Health information systems (HIS) in emergencies face a double dilemma: the information necessary to understand and respond to humanitarian crises must be timely and detailed, whereas the circumstances of these crises makes it challenging to collect it. Building on the technical work of the Health Metrics Network on HIS and starting with a systemic definition of HIS in emergencies, this paper re...