Humanitarian crises are multiplying around the globe, but a Brown University researcher says we could be responding in a more rigorous way. Emergency medicine doctor Adam Levine will head the new Humanitarian Innovation Initiative at Brown’s Watson Institute. He says academic researchers need to partner with humanitarian aid providers.
“Very little of what we do in the humanitarian sector is based on actual rigorous studies and much of it is based on anecdote,” said Levine. “We do what we did in the last emergency not knowing whether it worked or whether it had good outcomes for the people being served.”
Levine says the center will conduct studies of humanitarian crises and aid and work with organizations on the ground to improve their response. He says one example is cholera: researchers helped providers learn to respond by providing patients with a mix of water, salts, and sugars, rather than just water, to decrease mortality rates.
