About:

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors without Borders, is an international humanitarian organisation providing high-quality medical care in challenging settings in more than 70 countries. In order to provide high-quality medical care, they employ GIS technology in the form of an online accessibility model to determine the physical accessibility of their healthcare facilities to the local communities. This means that for a given populated area, the accessibility is measured in how quickly an individual in that location is able to visit MSF’s healthcare facilities such as mobile clinics, vaccination sites, and community health posts. Such insights are crucial in the environments in which MSF works – where patients and beneficiaries often walk for hours, or even days, to reach MSF’s sites.  The accessibility model determines the travel times to health facilities by leveraging various geospatial datasets, including topography, land cover, roads and paths, waterbodies and rivers, and population data. The type of data returned by the model provides an opportunity to incorporate cutting-edge geospatial analysis methods within rich and large-scale facility location problems to assist decision makers at MSF in determining where to locate emergency medical facilities.

In this workshop, we will bring together key stakeholders to explore the challenges of planning logistics operations for delivering high-quality medical care in complex environments. The workshop will feature three presentations. The first will provide insights into how MSF organizes its logistics operations. The second will highlight recent advancements in MSF’s cutting-edge online accessibility tool, while the third will focus on new developments in facility location algorithms.

Following the presentations, participants will break into focus groups to collaborate and identify research projects that address two critical challenges currently faced by MSF:

1. Ensuring accessibility under uncertainty – How can we maintain access to medical facilities despite uncertainties in travel time and accessibility caused by extreme climate events or conflict?
2. Behavioral Decision-Making – How should behavioral factors be considered when measuring accessibility and determining optimal facility locations?

This interactive session will foster meaningful discussions and help shape future research efforts to improve logistics planning in humanitarian settings.