Logistics and operations planning with Médecins Sans Frontières

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors without Borders, is an international humanitarian organisation providing high-quality medical care in challenging settings in more than 70 countries. In order to provide high-quality medical care, they employ GIS technology in the form of an online accessibility model to determine the physical accessibility of their healthcare facilities to the local communities. This means that for a given populated area, the accessibility is measured in how quickly an individual in that location is able to visit MSF’s healthcare facilities such as mobile clinics, vaccination sites, and community health posts. 

Such insights are crucial in the environments in which MSF works – where patients and beneficiaries often walk for hours, or even days, to reach MSF’s sites. The accessibility model determines the travel times to health facilities by leveraging various geospatial datasets, including topography, land cover, roads and paths, waterbodies and rivers, and population data. The type of data returned by the model provides an opportunity to incorporate cutting-edge geospatial analysis methods within rich and large-scale facility location problems to assist decision makers at MSF in determining where to locate emergency medical facilities.

The workshop will bring together MSF, the University of Edinburgh, and Stellenbosch University to explore challenges in delivering medical care in complex environments. Participants will engage with talks and hands-on modelling workshops on accessibility, logistics, and humanitarian facility planning. The workshop will be spread over two days and lunch, tea and coffee will be provided.

The number of places is limited so we kindly ask for you to sign up ahead of time: