In this interview, Colonel Qazi Ullah, Deputy Chief for Integrated Support Services at UNMIL and a Bangladeshi military logistician. Colonel Ullah begins by describing the initial challenges of coordinating the logistics of a 35-agency response effort for Ebola. He then details a variety of specific logistics problems he dealt with and the innovative solutions he and his team were able to design, relating to issues such as Priority Procurement Lists for donors, warehouse management, shipping and helicopters, and cold storage challenges for medical supplies. Finally, Col. Ullah concludes by reflecting on the overall logistical successes in the management of the Ebola crisis, offering lessons learned and best practices going forward. 

In this interview, Nicolas Dupont describes his role in overseeing  Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) procurement of medical and logistical supplies during its emergency response to the 2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa. He talks about how his department conducted quality assurance and product validation for supplies, while adhering to technical standards. He addresses how MSF’s procurement operations and supply chain adapted to the evolving nature of the outbreak. He describes the role of institutional donor funding on MSF’s external humanitarian partners during the outbreak and its effect on an organization’s spending capacity during a crisis. He explains MSF’s role in collaborating with its partners and the need to prioritize external customers amidst an emergency response. He notes the importance of creating centralized commercial and replenishment points during an emergency response and the benefit of facilitating strong cooperation between procurement departments and field operations. Finally, he reflects on the most difficult logistical issues he encountered and the need to avoid market bottlenecks in future emergency responses. 

In this interview, Jana Telfer describes how she became involved in the Ebola response in Liberia in 2014 when a CDC colleague recommended she come to assist the Liberian government in a risk communication approach to the crisis. When she arrived in September, she says, 60 different NGOs were working on 250 different projects. Along a similar vein, communications strategy lacked structure and there were simply too many voices to establish a coherent message. In the end, through coordination facilitated by the national Incident Management System (IMS), Liberia developed the most sophisticated Ebola message manual of the three affected countries: Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia. She explains that the messaging took an upward turn when traditional chiefs became involved in message dissemination, resulting in more significant behavior change in their respective communities.

In this interview, Raphael Frankfurter describes overseeing the Wellbody Alliance clinic’s response to the Ebola outbreak in Kono, Sierra Leone. He recounts succeeding where other organizations failed by institutionalizing empathy, tightening protective protocol for health workers, and coordinating with partners to streamline treatment. In particular, Frankfurter attributes Sierra Leoneans’ exceptional degree of cooperation with Wellbody to the pairing of each patient with a community health worker. He explains how Wellbody benefited from a mostly local staff, with a structure that promoted vital conversations among community health workers, supervisors, and managers. He notes that discussions with local leaders, residents, and traditional healers helped the organization identify and serve the area’s needs. Based on various players’ achievements and setbacks in the field, Frankfurter concludes that to effectively deliver care, healthcare providers should respect patients as humans from the beginning.