Humanitarian Supply Management and Logistics in the Health Sector

Introduction
Procurement, storage, mobilization, distribution—these and other
aspects of providing material assistance to people affected by disasters,
and the handling of those supplies employed by relief
organizations in their aid operations, require an organizational structure
to ensure the efficient management and utilization of resources that in
emergency situations, almost by definition, tend to be limited.
This structure is provided by logistics, the art or strategy of achieving
practical objectives as promptly and methodically as possible while making
the most effective use of available resources.
Two basic premises are addressed in this handbook:
1. Humanitarian supply logistics cannot be improvised at the time of
the emergency. Countries and organizations must see it as a cornerstone
of emergency planning and preparedness efforts. Employing
resources appropriately, and being able to secure those that are not
at hand, depends on first identifying their availability and location,
as well as the sources for obtaining them. All those activities
demanded by logistical deployment during an emergency—the
mechanisms for standardizing the various processes and all the necessary
documents for recording information and controlling, monitoring
and following up on the flow of supplies—must be prepared,
understood, and tested in advance.
2. The various stages in the flow of supplies from their point of origin
to the moment they reach their recipients—whether they be the
organizations managing the emergency or the actual beneficiaries of
the assistance—are a chain made up of very close links. How any one
of these links is managed invariably affects the others. Supply management
must therefore be the focus of an integral approach that
looks at all the links in the sequence and never loses sight of their
interdependence. This is known as supply chain logistics.
This handbook is intended as a guide to certain basic aspects of emergency
supply logistics and as reference material for all those involved in
xi