Humanitarian health workers operate in dangerous and uncertain contexts, in which mistakes and failures are
common, often have severe consequences, and are regularly repeated, despite being documented by many reviews. This Series paper aims to discuss the failures of medical humanitarianism. We describe why some of these recurrent failings, which are often not identified until much later, seem intractable: they are so entrenched in humanitarian action that they cannot be addressed by simple technical fixes.
This working paper sets about developing a common framework that summarises key knowledge in the field of psychosocial interventions in emergencies in order to provide agencies with some tools’ for making decisions about the type of interventions they can implement.
In this framework psychosocial well-being of individuals and of the larger social units is seen to be affected by three key issues: human capacity, social ecology, and culture and values: human capacity includes the physical and mental health of a person, as well as his or her knowledge and skills social ecology refers to the social connections and support that people share and that form an important part of psychosocial well-being culture and values points to the specific context and culture of communities that influence how people experience, understand and respond to events. These three areas are all inter-related and changes in one area will affect the other areas as well as the overall well-being of people