MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES UK



Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) provides life-saving emergency relief and longer-term medical care to some of the most vulnerable and excluded communities around the world. As an independent medical humanitarian organisation, we deliver care based only on need, regardless of ethnic origin, gender, religion or political affiliation.

MSF relies on donations from private individuals and organisations for the majority of its income. This private funding gives MSF the freedom to respond where needs are greatest and to speak out publicly, free from any political interference.

MSF has around 40,000 local and international staff working in over 70 countries, in some of the most challenging places in the world. Our medical humanitarian projects are supported by teams in 32 countries, including the UK, spread across Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and Australasia.

At MSF UK/IE, we support MSF's operations by building relationships with our supporters, increasing awareness of our work, raising funds, providing specialist medical expertise, catalysing change on medical humanitarian issues, and recruiting field staff. MSF UK/IE personnel are dynamic, hard-working, enthusiastic and committed to MSF's values and aims. In addition MSF continues to build upon its presence in Ireland to become a widely recognised, accepted and respected humanitarian organisation among Irish audiences, and within the Irish humanitarian and political sector.

THE MANSON UNIT, MSF UK

The Manson Unit is a multi-disciplinary medical team within MSF UK and is the London based part of Operational Centre Amsterdam’s (OCA) Public Health Department (PHD) which is responsible for providing strategic direction and integrated advice on medical and public health issues to the field and headquarters. In addition to providing medical management of MSF’s field operations, the PHD gives technical and strategic guidance across a range of fields including infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases, mental health, nutrition, paediatrics, and vaccination as well as epidemiology, social science, health promotion, laboratory, pharmaceutical quality/medical supply, and water/sanitation. We aim to improve the quality of MSF’s medical programmes worldwide, so the best possible care is delivered to our patients.

THE COMMUNITY APPROACH TEAM (CAT)

Community approaches involve working with communities and supporting them to take an active role in developing a response that fits with their needs and priorities. This includes an understanding of contextual circumstances and a focus on strengthening social cohesion, building on existing knowledge and coping strategies, and complementing the communities' autonomy and ability to care for itself.

The Community Approach Team (CAT) was formed as part of the OCA COVID-19 Taskforce to help consolidate community assessment learning, integrate this learning into COVID-19 technical documents and build capacity for working with communities at a project level. There is a recognised need to expand the CAT’s remit to support a broader range of functions to support the re-orientation of our programming towards the communities we serve, with increased emphasis on community engagement and a community approach. Greater understanding of these terms and what they mean in practice was identified as an early action for the group to support.

For the remainder of 2021 the CAT will focus on:

• mapping current community-level activities at field and headquarter level to help understand staff priorities and support needs e.g. (guidance, tools, etc).

• reviewing current usage of terminology describing community-based activities to help provide common language that supports connections across community-related work taking place in different projects.

RATIONALE

A consultation tool is being disseminated across OCA field projects to inform part of this mapping activity while information is being gathered from functional strategy teams. Commonly used community terminology has been collated along with principles on how to best to determine definitions where there are gaps and/or multiple definitions.

Dedicated support is required to analyse the findings of the mapping and to present the terminology review in a format that supports understanding and use.

PLEASE SEE BELOW LINK FOR THE FULL TERMS OF REFERENCE (TOR) AND HOW TO APPLY.

Closing date: 30 October 2021, 11.59pm

For any question, clarifications and queries please write an email to [email protected]