Haiti Case Study - The Department of Global Health and Social ...

liability, we agreed all comments would be “not for attribution”, nor would we disclose the
identity of the participants or the specific organization they worked for. This phase took place
from October 2011 to November 2011.
Phase three: Field-Based Data Collection
10. The study team travelled to Haiti for a total of 23 days and conducted interviews with
those on the initial stakeholder list as well as subsequent stakeholders identified during these
initial interviews. During field data collection the team also attended meetings, visited public
and private clinics and health organizations, and held informal round table discussions with
personnel from a variety of organizations. In total, the joint team conducted 40 interviews
with officials known to have been involved in the earthquake response and subsequent
reconstruction effort, including key representatives from:
• the Haitian public health and civilian protection sectors
• non-governmental agencies
• the private sector
• bilateral donor agencies
• UN agencies
• the UN Stabilization Mission to Haiti (MINUSTAH)
• the most prominent military response organizations
• foreign diplomatic representation
11. The interviews were semi-structured. Each interview was tailored to the specific
background of the participant and the aspects of health system strengthening they were
involved in. Each interview included a discussion of: the participants role and involvement in
Haiti’s earthquake response and health system protection or recovery; their understanding of
the major challenges faced in addressing the Haitians’ health needs; their perspective on the
security community’s impact on health system protection and recovery, the information and
coordination mechanisms they used to interact with the global response and/or security
community, and their perceptions of what went well and what could have been improved in
terms of recovering and strengthening Haiti’s health system in the aftermath of the
earthquake and cholera outbreak. As with the background interviews, all field interviews
were conducted on a non-attributable basis.
12. Interview notes were compiled into interview transcripts which were then reviewed by
the study team with the salient issues and recurrent themes extracted. This phase
concluded in January 2012.
Phase four: Data Analysis and Report Writing
13. The data collected in the previous phases was reviewed and further investigated
through additional targeted research, including additional interviews, which refined and
deepened the team’s understanding of the salient findings. With this deeper understanding
the team identified the key themes and issues and selected the major stories to develop into
narratives that would best illustrate these themes. Narratives were built around instances of
when the security community impacted one or more aspects of Haiti’s health system, the
coordination and information sharing mechanisms relevant to the instance, and the success
and challenges implicit in the example that illustrate how all global actors can work together
to best support health system strengthening in future crises.
14. A draft report was written and circulated for comments and feedback to informal
advisors familiar with health system strengthening issues, military policy, and civilian military
interactions, before being presented to the Advisory Board on 18 March 2012. Based on the
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