Overview

GRI’s Emergency Relief program focuses on bringing together the most in-depth, effective medical care available and years of experience working in emergency settings. Through proven methods, GRI works to ensure that high-mortality diseases are controlled in the midst of emergencies and in the post-emergency phase. All GRI programs are built on sustainable approaches to building local capacity to respond to emergencies. GRI specializes in emergency response in natural and man-made disasters and has constructed a leading global response network for cholera, shigellosis, pneumonia, malaria, malnutrition and other high-mortality diseases in emergencies.

How We Provide Care

Due to the insecure situations that most GRI programs operate in, it is absolutely essential that programs are built to be operated at a local level.  GRI strives to run all programs through local staff and achieve superior medical care through the following ways:

• Focusing on diseases that cause high numbers of fatalities in emergency settings.
• Treating the most needy and most sick first, while also managing care of moderate cases to prevent them from becoming more serious.
• Creating a network of disease surveillance (weekly reporting of cases from each treatment facility) so that we can see if diseases are increasing in certain areas, which allows us to catch outbreaks before they become emergencies.
• Treating disease from a holistic approach, developing methods of prevention, treatment and control.
• Training local medical staff and empowering them to operate when GRI international staff are no longer needed, which creates the least amount of shock when international programs are phased into local programs.

Epidemiology

GRI Emergency Relief programs are built to be highly effective as beneficiaries of our services deserve to receive the best care available. Therefore, GRI implements the use of disease monitoring and program monitoring to consistently adjust our programs according to the most serious cases.