Conducting operational research in humanitarian settings: is there a shared path for humanitarians, national public health authorities and academics?
| Autor: | Hilda Harb, Jennifer Leaning, Rodolfo Rossi, Randa Hamadeh, Carla Zmeter, Ariana S. Marnicio, Christophe Martin, Enrica Leresche, Claudia Truppa |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Health (social science)
Debate media_common.quotation_subject lcsh:Special situations and conditions Humanitarian crisis Population Organizational culture Context (language use) Epistemic community Operational research 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Political science Protracted crisis 030212 general & internal medicine education media_common education.field_of_study business.industry lcsh:RC952-1245 030503 health policy & services Research partnership lcsh:Medical emergencies. Critical care. Intensive care. First aid Public Health Environmental and Occupational Health Health services research Humanitarian response Evidence-based humanitarian action lcsh:RC86-88.9 Public relations Negotiation Co-production General partnership 0305 other medical science business |
| Zdroj: | Conflict and Health Conflict and Health, Vol 14, Iss 1, Pp 1-14 (2020) |
| ISSN: | 1752-1505 |
| Popis: | In humanitarian contexts, it is a difficult and multi-faceted task to enlist academics, humanitarian actors and health authorities in a collaborative research effort. The lack of research in such settings has been widely described in the past decade, but few have analysed the challenges in building strong and balanced research partnerships. The major issues include considering operational priorities, ethical imperatives and power differentials. This paper analyses in two steps a collaborative empirical endeavour to assess health service utilization by Syrian refugee and Lebanese women undertaken by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) and the Harvard François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center.First, based on challenges documented in the literature, we shed light on how we negotiated appropriate research questions, methodologies, bias analyses, resource availability, population specificities, security, logistics, funding, ethical issues and organizational cultures throughout the partnership.Second, we describe how the negotiations required each partner to go outside their comfort zones. For the academics, the drivers to engage included the intellectual value of the collaboration, the readiness of the operational partners to conduct an empirical investigation and the possibility that such work might lead to a better understanding in public health terms of how the response met population needs. For actors responding to the humanitarian crisis (the ICRC and the MOPH), participating in a technical collaboration permitted methodological issues to be worked through in the context of deliberations within the wider epistemic community.We find that when they collaborate, academics, humanitarian actors and health authorities deploy their respective complementarities to build a more comprehensive approach. Barriers such as the lack of uptake of research results or weak links to the existing literature were overcome by giving space to define research questions and develop a longer-term collaboration involving individual and institutional learning. There is the need ahead of time to create balanced decision-making mechanisms, allow for relative financial autonomy, and define organizational responsibilities. Ultimately, mutual respect, trust and the recognition of each other’s expertise formed the basis of an initiative that served to better understand populations affected by conflict and meet their needs. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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