**Author details**

*Military Engineering*

**6. Conclusions**

is essential

supplies)

the affected country

and improve operations

required for longer missions

records improve efficiency of field hospital

consideration before mission deployment

operations by local medical staff

*Insights emerging from our study for future relief missions.*

by the local health authorities in order to ensure continuity of operations by local medical staff or newly arrived substitutes. In most cases, supplies and equipment were handed over to local health systems under the direction of local authorities. While the selection and incorporation of drafted highly qualified medical personnel within the military framework, characteristic for the Israeli FFH model, provides excellent medical performance customized for the specific mission, this restricts the longevity of the mission, as drafted personnel are expected to resume their civil work within a relatively short period of time. Thus, most missions lasted 2–3 weeks, only. Nevertheless, as happened in the Rwandan disaster, and in other missions addressing disasters in Cambodia and in Ethiopia, substituting teams of medical experts and additional personnel were created with changing operative shifts at 2–4 weeks

intervals [39]. This enabled protracted mission activity, as required.

as facilitating legal details with local authorities

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.

1. An advanced team is crucial for defining needs, expectations, priorities, and identifying risks, as well

3. Coordination with both the local health system and other aid organizations operations in disaster area

4. It is imperative to be aware and respect the national culture differences between an aid mission and

5. Field hospital must be entirely self-sufficient (transportation, energy, food, water, equipment and

8. Integration of volunteer teams from other countries into field hospital can fill lack of human resource

9. The optimal operative period is 2–3 weeks. Substitutions and supplementary airborne logistics are

12. Communication devices, Information systems, and electronic medical data storage and handling

13. Before departure back to home country, the delegation should coordinate with local authorities the transfer of authority over the FFH facility, equipment, and supplies in order to ensure continuity of

14. Ethical issues pertaining to treatment of patients and their families in disaster area must be taken into

2. Swift deployment providing adaptive operative flexibility is maintained by delegation's multi-

disciplinary heterogeneity of personnel, and readiness for improvisations

6. Providing security to field hospital may be necessary in conflict areas 7. The contribution of translators and local health employees is significant

10. Standardization of procedures is essential in order to optimize medical response 11. After few days, most of medical activity becomes non-urgent treatment of population

**68**

**Table 3.**

Michael Naor School of Business Administration, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

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

© 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, provided the original work is properly cited.
