For more than 20 years, Groupe URD has been evaluating humanitarian response and crisis management, which almost always has a ‘health’ component. In all of these contexts, from Afghanistan to Colombia, by way of the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean, they have observed how health systems react to crises, whether it be in terms of war and disaster medicine, regular public health systems, or the management of major health crises, such as cholera and Ebola. Their work on collapse scenarios, which recently figured in their review “Humanitarian Aid on the Move”, shows how seriously we should take such health crises due to the disastrous cross-border, or global impacts that they can have.
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, they decided to bring together the lessons from our work on major health crises so that they can be shared.