Protection of Healthcare and Law Enforcement – Call for Proposals at International Committee of the Red Cross

The ICRC is looking for a consultant to carry out a review of good practices and policies pertaining to the protection of healthcare from violence and facilitation of safe access to healthcare by law enforcement agencies.

BACKGROUND

Law enforcement and healthcare increasingly overlap during armed conflict and emergency situations. This interface can at times be synergistic or complimentary. But all too often, the two domains operate competitively or conflict with one another. The negative impacts of this overlap are evident in many of the contexts where the ICRC works – from various examples of violence perpetrated against health workers by police during political protests, through to law enforcement operations (LEOs) that impede medical providers from carrying out their work or residents from accessing health facilities.

In 2020, the ICRC carried out a review of existing open source information in order to map areas of interaction between the provision of healthcare and law enforcement with a particular focus on protection of healthcare. The resulting report laid out a threefold typology of such interactions. These consist primarily of the regulation of access to and provision of healthcare; law enforcement activities that impact patients who are seeking, are in need of, or are receiving medical care; and the protective actions of Law enforcement authorities (LEAs) that enable safer access to or provision of healthcare. It also presented a number of case studies illustrating the various modes of interaction.

While the review of open sources provided ample material allowing to highlight the problematic areas and various potential humanitarian consequences resulting from non-synergistic or competing interface between healthcare provision and LEOs, it also exposed the acute lack of documented good practices in this regard and scarcity of guidance allowing both LEAs and healthcare providers to improve their interactions.

Moreover, the eruption of the Covid-19 pandemic since the previous report was commissioned, signifies that a number of issues that unfolded during the pandemic, as well as the resources that presumably serve to describe and respond to those, could not have been covered by the report.

This consultancy aims at filling this gap by producing a number of case studies and practical and policy guidelines for LEAs.

While armed conflict and counterterrorism operations often push healthcare providers and law enforcement together, this work will focus instead on other emergency situations, emphasizing in particular the dynamics within urban violence, civil unrest, and pandemics.

Deliverables:

• Inception paper of no more than five pages is produced by the selected consultant.
• Open sources have been scanned based on keywords and methodology agreed with HCiD and police and gendarmerie (PGE) during the inception phase;
• A panel of internal and external experts has been identified in order to serve as sources of information on challenges, emerging good practices and recommendations;
• A structured questionnaire has been produced and administered to the ICRC PGE staff in the field with the assistance of the PGE adviser in Geneva with the aim of identifying trends in Healthcare provider- LEA interface and good practices;
• In-depth interviews have been conducted with internal and external informants identified based on the results of the open sources review and the questionnaire, as well as discussions with HCiD and PGE staff;
• Three to four in-depth case studies of good practices have been produced
• Comprehensive recommendations on HCP-LEA interface with relevance to protection of healthcare have been produced and reviewed by the panel of experts;
• The above two deliverables (case studies + recommendations) have been described in an external-facing report not longer than 30 pages.

Timeframe

The work is planned to commence on 1 November and the deadline for the delivery of the completed report is 30 November 2021. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.