Yes, we need health care professionals, but they also need to understand management

SPEED OF RESPONSE AND MANAGERIAL SKILLS ARE REQUIRED TO BEST OPERATE IN RAPIDLY CHANGING CONTEXTS

Health care and non-medical personnel who provide humanitarian support in emergency contexts need to have not only technical but also managerial and cross-cultural skills, with a propensity for innovation, aimed at implementing new ideas and improving existing processes. Silvia Fontana, head of human resources for Médecins Sans Frontières Italy, as well as a Bocconi graduate of Bocconi University in Business Administration (CLEA), thus stresses the importance of courses for the various professional updates. Final objective: to ensure that the missions of humanitarian operators in the field enable them to "do the best for the most vulnerable" by improving access to and quality of medical care. A challenge that is accentuated by having to work "not only in situations of particular emergency but also with little information available while abrupt changes in the evolution of conflicts are getting more frequent", says Fontana, who is also a member of the board of directors of the Italian Forum on Meritocracy and sits on the scientific board of the Valeria Solesin Award.

Thanks to the attention to reactiveness, concludes Fontana, "we were able to respond quickly, for example, to requests for intervening in Codogno, south of Milan, to try to stem the first Covid outbreaks. The intervention team? It was composite in terms of the mix of experiences, demonstrating that different skills working together are more effective".

by Camillo Papini
Translated by Alex Foti