international Expertise

Emergency Preparedness & Response

Ensuring Continuity of Care and Building Resilience

Natural disasters, disease outbreaks, terrorist attacks, and political unrest can derail health systems, overwhelming providers and disrupting care for entire communities. Because the best time to respond to an emergency is before it actually happens, we work with public health providers and governments at all levels to strengthen health systems to prepare for catastrophic events.

Because we are on the ground in more than 40 countries, we can mobilize quickly to respond to natural or man-made disasters including earthquakes, floods, infectious disease outbreaks such as COVID, Monkeypox, Ebola, measles, and the plague, and broader social disruption due to armed conflicts and political upheaval. Through our large in-country programs, we provide coordination, management, and critical support before, during, and after catastrophes occur.

We facilitate collaboration between the humanitarian, development, and health sectors to build, restore, strengthen, and maintain strong health systems and promote global health security.

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Infectious disease surveillance

Developing and managing systems to identify disease outbreaks in their earliest stages to mitigate consequences.

Broad public health support

Combining our extensive technical skills in immunization, MNCH/FP, and nutrition with our deep understanding of local contexts, we ensure that services on the relief-to-development continuum are high-quality, appropriate, and efficient.

Supply chain logistics

Adapting tools and working with agencies and organizations such as the UN, Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, the Reproductive Health Supply Chain working group and other partners, we ensure that refugees, internally displaced persons, and recovering communities—as well as health care providers—receive the supplies they need, from personnel protective equipment to ongoing medical supplies.

Risk assessment

We evaluate the risks that individuals, communities, and countries face before developing preparedness plans and allocating resources.

Disaster management framework and strategies

Working with public health policymakers and providers to develop plans to respond to catastrophes and continue delivery of crucial health services, we have long advocated for engagement of trained providers in displaced person and refugee areas to build trust and provide services within the socio-cultural norms of each setting.

Community support

We support community-based providers including health workers and volunteers during crisis and recovery periods with targeted training, materials, and replacement of supplies and equipment destroyed by disasters.

Building capacity of local organizations and networks

Capacity building is a cornerstone of JSI’s work, and is especially critical during periods of shock and transition. For instance, throughout the Ebola crisis in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, JSI helped establish Ebola survivor networks to reduce stigma and ongoing physical and mental health problems and developed a package of proven interventions to support this effort.

Working with communities of practice

As a founding member of the Inter-agency Working Group on Reproductive Health in Crises and a contributor to the Sphere Guidelines and the Minimum Initial Service Package for reproductive health, JSI serves on numerous national and global task forces defining standards and actions along the preparedness-relief-development-resilience continuum.

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