By Rachel Simon on September 8th, 2021

Dear IAPHL Members,

Hoping that you all are safe and well.

As a follow-up to concluding the Human Centered Design Member Assessment, I am happy to announce that a summary of the findings and recommendations is now available. The summaries are available in English, French, and Spanish on the publications section of the IAPHL website.  As you read the findings, please note that the recommendations have been made by the consulting group based on what you, the members, have told them through interviews and completing the surveys.  The IAPHL Secretariat had the results of the assessment presented at our last Advisory Group meeting.  At this time, we are still looking at which recommendations we can act on right away and those that may need further discussion and resources.  As always, we welcome your comments.

IAPHL is currently one of the coordinators for the Health and Humanitarian Logistics Conference.  As you saw from our postings on social media and the listserv, HHL has been offering (not IAPHL) free registrations for those that registered before August 31st.  I hope many of you took advantage of that.

We also continue to serve on the Indaba Committee for the PtD spearheaded conference that we had to postpone twice now.  I think that the current hope is that we could put on such a conference sometime in the later part of 2022 in Zambia.

We continue with our interviews of the chapter leaders.  I hope you watched the interview with Motomoke Eomba (Mama Moto) who is the founder of IAPHL and now trying to start a country chapter in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). As with all of our interviews, you can find them on the IAPHL website.  We hope to have another interview with one of our chapter leaders this month.  If you have ideas of other people working in health supply chain for an interview, please let us know.  You might even be able to do the interview!

We hope to have at least one webinar this month.  The next one will be on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in health supply chain and will be moderated by a chapter leader from Tanzania. You can register here.

Finally, I hope those of you who have expressed interest in joining a WhatsApp group for Humanitarian Logistics are now members of the IAPHL HL subgroup.  There will be a virtual discussion forum for this group on September 16, 2021 at 9a.m. EST / 1p.m. GMT. During this meeting, we would like to hear from you regarding your communications needs and areas of interest. We will also review the proposition to create a WhatsApp group and how this would complement the IAPHL / HCL community.

If interested, please register for the meeting here.

All the best,

Walter

From the Desk of the ED IAPHL: September 2021