The Problem

Providing humanitarian assistance to populations affected by man-made and natural disasters is a growing activity in international health. Although perhaps not yet a science, an increasing number of recommendations, guidelines, and minimum standards have recently been published. One could say, at least, that a certain discipline should be expected from individuals and organizations that intervene even in the direst of circumstances. Yet, for a variety of reasons, emergency relief remains largely an amateur field, practiced by people who are deeply concerned by the sometimes overwhelming problems, but who are unaware of even the most firmly established health care priorities. In other areas, too, there is need for training of humanitarian workers in the needs and problems of the affected populations, and a requirement for understanding the complex interrelationships between the different factors which may be operating in emergencies, and how these can best be dealt with. 

To address this problem, and to try to professionalize the field, a number of organizations have developed different kinds of training courses. There are MPH programs at a few Schools of Public Health in the United States and in Europe, and at least four well-developed short courses, varying in length from a few days to three weeks, are given a number of times a year at different sites around the world. These programs have been in high demand, although it has proven difficult at times for non-governmental organizations to release personnel for training purposes and to find institutional funding to pay course fees. But even in the best of circumstances, the reach of timely face-to-face, training is limited, especially when personnel turnover is rapid, as is the case in the field of humanitarian assistance. As it currently stands, only a few hundred people are being trained each year, and only a limited proportion of them ever put their knowledge into practice. 

What is needed is a comprehensive training package that would allow a large number of humanitarian workers to understand the complexities of their work, to learn the minimum standards and how to attain them, and to see how their work interacts with that of other relief workers. Even better would be a training method that would allow workers to learn Œat homeš, without having to leave the emergency setting in which they are actually working. Best, the training should be as practical as possible, more hands-on than theoretical, and allow the student to visualize what might happen in a real-life setting.