On Thursday 19 September 2024, the Crash team was delighted to welcome Priscille Sauvegrain for a conference on medical practices in maternal health in France and the role played by racial categories. This meeting, prepared with Caroline Izambert, was moderated by Judith Soussan. 

Cet article de Nicolas Dodier s’appuie sur les premiers résultats d’une enquête, basée sur la consultation d’archives et la réalisation d’entretiens, relative à la mise en œuvre de programmes de chirurgie par l’organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

In this paper, Jacob Burns analyzes MSF's activities in the provision of social support.  In the introduction, he suggests a rough outline of different ‘social’ problems that MSF has turned to between the 1980s and the 2010s. The second part of the paper is a report of a field visit conducted in October – November 2023 to Goma, DRC.

This article is an addition to Issue 25 of Humanitarian Alternatives "Food crisis: what role for humanitarian actors?", published in March 2024.

On Thursday 29 February 2024, we welcomed sociologists Théo Boulakia and Nicolas Mariot, the authors of "L’Attestation. Une expérience d’obéissance de masse, printemps 2020". This conference was prepared and moderated by Elba Rahmouni and Marc Le Pape.

Dans cet épisode de La Zone d'Écoute, le podcast de Médecins Sans Frontières, Marion Péchayre revient sur le programme de prise en charge du cancer du col de l’utérus au Malawi.

Based on a reflection regarding how patient rights have changed, in France in particular, Fabrice Weissman discusses humanitarian medicine’s shortcomings in that regard and proposes several avenues for improvement at MSF.  This text was originally posted on MSF’s associative website, The Souk.

On 3rd and 4th February 2022, the CRASH organised a workshop aimed principally at the directors and operational managers of MSF Operational Centre Paris (OCP) to reflect on current debates, and to determine which elements of the discussion would be the most relevant to resolve to support the advancement of MSF OCP’s operational projects. Is access to medicines the same issue today as it was when MSF first became interested in the mid-1990s? Rather than just concentrating on the obstacles to accessing medicines, should the debate be broadened to encompass what are now called ‘health products’ or even further, towards access to care and thus largely structural problems of human resources, financing, or the absence of national health insurance policies?

“Death is an extremely grave non-emergency; its only treatment is mourning”. That is how doctor Miguel Martinez Almoyna introduces his concept of emergency. The retired 92-year-old anaesthesiologist played an active role in creating France’s SMUR, and later SAMU, emergency medical systems. Still quite active overseas (in Brazil and Mexico), where he has exported the French pre-hospital model, he explains his approach to régulation médicale, whose purpose is to guide patients to the medical services their condition requires while offering a range of responses corresponding to different degrees of severity and urgency.

This article was published on December 22nd, 2021, in the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs (Issue 3, Volume 3).
Despite a concerted international effort in recent decades that has yielded significant progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS, the disease continues to kill large numbers of people, especially in certain regions like rural Ndhiwa district in Homa Bay County, Kenya. Although there is still no definitive cure or vaccine, UNAIDS has set an ambitious goal of ending the epidemic by 2030, specifically via its 90-90-90 (treatment cascade) strategy – namely that 90 per cent of those with HIV will know their status; 90 per cent of those who know their status will be on antiretroviral therapy and 90 per cent of those on antiretroviral therapy will have an undetectable viral load. These bold assumptions were put to the test in a five-year pilot project launched in June 2014 by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Kenya’s Ministry of Health in Ndhiwa district, where an initial NHIPS 1 study by Epicentre (MSF’s epidemiology centre) in 2012 revealed some of the world’s highest HIV incidence and prevalence, and a poor “treatment cascade”. Six years later a new Epicentre study, NHIPS 2, showed that the 90-90-90 target had been more than met. What explains this ‘success’? And given the still-high incidence, is it truly a success? What follows is an interview on the political, scientific, and operational challenges of the Ndhiwa project with MSF Deputy Director of Operations Pierre Mendiharat and physician Léon Salumu, Head of MSF France Kenya programs, conducted by Elba Rahmouni.

Cet entretien, conduit par Aline Richard Zivohlava, a été publié le 1er novembre 2022 dans le magazine Le Figaro santé.
Guerre en Europe, menaces virales, risques terroristes... L'action humanitaire a dû se transformer pour s'adapter au temps présent. Ancien président de Médecins sans frontières, Rony Brauman en est un témoin privilégié. Tout n'est pas noir, souligne-t-il : la qualité des soins est meilleure, les personnels des pays du Sud montent en puissance et la médecine humanitaire a étendu son champ d'action.

This article was published on December 22nd, 2021 in the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs (Issue 3, Volume 3).
In this article, Natalie Roberts analyses the actions and positioning of MSF during the Ebola outbreak in Nord Kivu (Democratic Republic of Congo, 2018-2020).