**6. Conclusions**

In conclusion, our study provides comprehensive review of ten missions conducted by the IDF over the last three decades. **Table 3** summarizes insights emerging from our research for future relief missions. The uniqueness of our study is that we investigated the response to different types of disasters, with some of the humanitarian missions sent in response to natural disasters (earthquake, tsunami, or typhoon) while others were delivered to war zones and ethnic clash terrains.


**69**

**Author details**

disaster relief operations.

Jerusalem, Israel

Michael Naor

*Healthcare Military Logistics at Disaster Regions around the World: Insights from Ten Field…*

More specifically, the cases we describe in Rwanda and Kosovo contribute to the literature because they demonstrate the usefulness of FFHs not only for natural disasters but also in situations of civil war. The ten missions varied also in their geographical distance from the home base in Israel, which impacted arrival time. While some of the disasters where located in developing countries such as Haiti, others occurred in highly developed countries such as Japan. The objective of the missions determined the duration of stay. For example, in the earthquake disasters in Turkey, FFHs were designed to assist in the acute care of casualties for a few days, only, within the period of time of recovering survivors trapped under the ruble of collapsed buildings, while at Rwanda, the goal was to participate in protracted, large

scale lethal epidemics among displaced population fleeing a civil war.

prone to psychological distress secondary to the traumatic event [43].

A crucial avenue of research concerns the ethical issues humanitarian operations face, such as which patients to admit, given the limited capacity of hospital beds and other resources [40, 41]. For instance, it was noted based on experience in Japan and Haiti that premature deliveries, low-birth-weight neonates, and other complications with increased risk of infection and blood-loss increase at disaster areas. Because survival rates of low-birth weight neonates delivered in a disaster environment are diminished, the dilemma of whether to impose a minimum weight threshold for preterm neonates to receive treatment is an ethical issue, which obstetrics and gynecology teams should be prepared to deal with [42]. Another example, during Nepal mission it was found that procedural sedation and analgesia (PSA) should be a priority when treating pediatric victims of disaster since they are

In sum, this study has highlighted the importance of studying the fruitful collaboration between military and civilian organizations in the establishment of field hospitals. We hope that the future research avenues we sketched will motivate other scholars to engage in this field to prepare the global community to deal with major

School of Business Administration, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem,

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

\*Address all correspondence to: michael.naor@mail.huji.ac.il

provided the original work is properly cited.

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.88214*
