• Crown Agents are looking for senior procurement specialists for their office in Arlington VA (USA) and Malawi; procurement specialists for Mongolia and Malawi; an ARV logistics officer for Botswana; a procurement consultant for Tanzania; a supply chain operations manager for Malawi; an SCMS deputy country director for Rwanda; a logistics assistant for their office in London (UK); public procurement advisors for several countries; and a team leader for Malawi
• Save the Children is looking for an operations director, a senior procurement specialist and two roving logistics specialists for Haiti; a senior manager procurement, contracts and compliance for the West Bank/Gaza; and two senior logistics specialists to be based in Washington DC (USA).
• Maxwell Stamp is looking for a project costing and procurement specialist for Laos
• UNICEF is looking for a procurement assistant for their office in Geneva (Switzerland), a contracts officer for their office in Copenhagen (Denmark), and a supply and logistics specialist for North Korea. Sorry, no links, they still hide their vacancies behind a registration process.
• DanChurchAid is looking for a field logistics officer for Katanga (Congo DRC).
• Merlin is looking for deputy logistics coordinators for Côte d’Ivoire and Congo (DRC); a logistician for Congo (DRC); logistics managers for South Sudan, Kenya, Pakistan, Congo (DRC), and the Central African Republic; a logistics/administration officer for Gode (Ethiopia); senior logisticians for Grand Kru and  Montserado (Liberia); and a surge logistics officer for South Sudan.
• JSI is looking for a deputy chief of party SCMS for Nigeria.
• Concern Worldwide is looking for a transport manager for Haiti; an assistant country director systems for Afghanistan; and a general systems manager and a logistics and administration coordinator for Zambia.
• The IRC is looking for logistics managers for Congo (DRC) and Haiti.
• The IFRC is looking for a trainee logistics delegate for based in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), an operation coordinator for Guatemala, a head of support services based in Panama City (Panama), a procurement delegate for Haiti, and a senior procurement officer based in Geneva (Switzerland).
• MSH are looking for a senior program associate – supply planning/MIS/M&E for Bangladesh.

[Image: Job opportunities by Coffeechica. Some rights reserved.]

Related posts:

1. Latest job opportunities (May 4, 2010)
2. Latest job opportunities (May 12, 2010)
3. Latest job opportunities (February 28, 2010)

• The IFRC is looking for a logistics unit manager for Panama, a head of support services for the Africa zone (based in Johannesburg), a systems and processes officer for their HQ (Geneva), and a trainee logistics delegate for the Asia Pacific zone (based in Kuala Lumpur).
• Crown Agents are looking for a procurement specialist, a senior procurement specialist, and a procurement agent manager/team leader for Jordan; an SCMS ART logistics advisor for Botswana; a customs expeditor/logistics specialist and a procurement specialist for Ethiopia; and a procurement specialist, a senior procurement specialist, and a procurement agent manager/team leader for Moldova.

Related posts:

1. Latest job opportunities (2 November 2009)
2. Latest job opportunities (6 November 2009)
3. Latest job opportunities (November 10, 2009)

• GOAL is looking for an assistant country director, systems for Ethiopia, an assistant country director, operations for Sudan, a logistics officer for Kenya, and logistics coordinators for Sierra Leone and Uganda.
• MERLIN is looking for a logistician for their programmes in Kenya and Somalia (based in Nairobi) and a logistics coordinator for Sudan. They’re also still looking for logistics coordinators for ‘Africa’; perhaps somebody should explain to them that Africa is not a country.
• Solidarités is looking for logistics coordinators for Kenya/Somalia, Chad, and the Central African Republic; a base manager/logistician for Bunia (DRC); an administrative/logistics coordinator for Zimbabwe; and a base manager/logistician/administrator for Walikalé (DRC).

Related posts:

1. Latest job opportunities (November 19, 2009)
2. Latest job opportunities (6 November 2009)
3. Latest job opportunities (2 November 2009)

As I have written before, health logistics as a discipline tends to ignore the impact of the logistics of daily life on health. Possibly the clearest example is how physical access to primary health care impacts on health.

What do you do when you are seriously sick? Well, most of us in the developed world would go to a doctor. But what if that doctor is a four-hour trip away? Even here in Australia, a developed country by any account, access to health care is much worse in remote and rural areas than in the cities, and the health outcomes are as can be expected. Similar results have been shown in studies in other developed countries.

Obviously, things are much worse in developing countries. That four-hour trip suddenly translates in four days (or more) on the road, or rather, on a muddy track, on your own feet or bumping along on the back of some animal instead of a smooth ride in a car or train. The health outcomes are horrifying. For instance, a recent study in Ethiopia suggested that urban elderly Ethiopian women had about a 1.6-1.8 times longer life expectancy than rural ones. Or this one: the rural areas around Kunming (China) suffer from 50% more premature deaths than the city itself.

Solutions obviously need to be found, and some are already being implemented. Foremost, we need to concentrate more of our preventative efforts on less accessible areas. Of course, that is easier said than done: the same issues confronting a patient searching medical treatment, are hindering outreach and health education efforts — and when it comes to e.g. water and sanitation efforts, the logistics issues are even worse.

Another way to deal with these issues is by decreasing the distance between patient and health care. There are basically two ways of doing so: by bringing access points to the patients, or by bringing patients to the access points.

The former can be done by more dispersed access points, or by mobile clinics. Both have some serious drawbacks. Peripheral health access points are either unable to cope with more serious complaints, or would have to be impossibly well-equipped in a setting that is resource poor — you cannot put a secondary hospital in every hamlet, definitely not in a resource-constrained setting like a developing country. Mobile clinics can be slightly better equipped and resourced, but are only occasionally available to any given population and hence cannot deal with e.g. many emergencies, simply because they are not there when the emergencies occur; moreover, they are a shocking waste of time for the health care professionals, who spend much of their working hours trekking from one place to the next instead of on patient care.

Bringing patients to the health care settings is something that is rarely done. In developed countries we do so using individual patient transport (e.g. ambulances or commercial patient transport), but that is not an option for developing countries. Another way would be to use communal patient transport. Imagine a bus (or animal-drawn cart, or a caravan of donkeys or camels…) making scheduled rounds along a number of reasonably short circuits, picking up patients and delivering them to the nearest health care facility, and returning them on the next round after treatment. It would still not solve the problems of emergency care, but for the less acute cases it would bring patients possibly faster and more comfortably, but definitely at less cost for them to the care they need — without wasting a valuable and scarce resource, health professionals’ time.

Obviously there are issues around it that need to be solved, but it seems to be a intriguing possibility with many possible advantages. I know it has been done at very small scales, e.g. in refugee camps and in the immediate surroundings of some health posts here and there, but as far as I know it has never been tried in a larger area (but I would be chuffed to be corrected). High time for a trial, I would say.

(Images by Aaron Wieler and Shawn Alladio.)

Related posts:

1. The public/private mix in health logistics
2. Three parties rolled in to one: third-party logistics for global health and aid
3. The unanswered questions of aid and health logistics

• Crown agents is looking for a Supply Chain Management System (SCMS) project manager, an SCMS country manager for Côte d’Ivoire, an SCMS country director for Namibia, a procurement advisor for Morocco, customs specialists for Angola, and various other logistical professionals. An overview can be found here.
• Concern Worldwide is looking for a logistics coordinator for Afghanistan.
• Goal Ireland is looking for an emergency programme regional logistics manager for Ethiopia.
• The IRC is looking for a procurement coordinator and a logistics manager for the DRC, and a logistics manager for Chad

Related posts:

1. Latest job opportunities (5 April 2009)
2. Latest job opportunities (30 April 2009)
3. Latest job opportunities (22 April 2009)