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March 12 - 15, 2007
Monterey, California
Click here for the workshop report.
Workshop Description:
Background: Practitioners and scholars have noted the tension between efforts to provide emergency healthcare relief during armed conflict and efforts to reconstruct sustainable public healthcare services in its aftermath. During the emergency and stabilization phases of a conflict (i.e., during and immediately after armed conflict), responding organizations tend to focus on the immediate health needs of the local populace. When this phase ends and reconstruction begins, the focus shifts to development of local resources and infrastructure that can be sustained without ongoing, direct foreign assistance. However, during these phases, responding organizations may inadvertently create an unsustainable “aid culture,” in which the local population comes to rely on foreign healthcare personnel, supplies and technologies, and local capacity for healthcare is supplanted and/or de-legitimized. Such a culture impedes reconstruction of the healthcare system if skills, technologies and expectations are not developed that would allow the local population to take ownership of healthcare provision once reconstruction begins.
Focus: The Center for Stabilization and Reconstruction Studies (CSRS) conducted a three- and one-quarter day workshop on ways in which government civilian agencies, non-governmental organizations, inter-governmental organizations and the armed forces can work individually and collectively to:
- Support a smoother transition from emergency healthcare relief to reconstruction of a sustainable public healthcare system; and,
- Incorporate and reinforce local capacities for sustainability and ownership of a healthcare system immediately after armed conflict.
Participants discussed healthcare roles, missions and appropriate best practices taken by responding organizations. The workshop focused on three essential tasks of building healthcare systems in post-conflict environments:
- Human resource development – how to train and work with local talent, and to promote those resources that survived conflict and are conflict-resilient;
- Local technical capacity – how to enable the growth of local, sustainable technical infrastructure and to work with local structures that have survived conflict rather than replace them with new ones; and,
- Local ownership – how to diminish the “aid culture” and build local trust in health services provided by the local authorities.
Learning Objectives:
1. Define ways in which the emergency and stabilization phases can both obstruct and enable post-conflict rebuilding of local technical capacity, political capacity and human resources;
2. Identify abilities/constraints that shapes each community’s capacity to incorporate reconstruction goals into their missions and operations;
3. Identify areas for potential collaboration within and between communities to promote sustainable institution building in these areas; and,
4. Describe the conditions each community requires to enable a smooth transition to rebuilding sustainable healthcare systems.
Methodology: The workshop consisted of a series of plenary presentations, panel discussions and problem-solving by breakout groups that focus on best practices, successes and failures in healthcare sector rebuilding.
Participants: 30 representatives from US and international government civilian agencies, non-governmental organizations, inter-governmental organizations and the armed forces participated in the event. Participants were a mix of headquarters-level policy/planners who look at the broad aims of their respective communities and field-level operators who must implement the plans from both an emergency response and development perspective. CSRS attempted and largle succeeded in obtaining equal numbers of representatives from each community.
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