Enhancing Access to Family Planning Services: Challenges and Opportunities for OR/OM

Séminaires scientifiques

Harwin de Vries, Professeur adjoint, Erasmus University, Pays-Bas

Séminaire organisé par le Département de gestion des opérations et de la logistique

Ouvert à tous.

Salle : Associations étudiantes, 1er étage, section verte, édifice Côte-Sainte-Catherine

Pour informations ou questions : Marie-Ève Rancourt marie-eve.rancourt@hec.ca

Informations sur le conférencier : 

Harwin de Vries is Associate Professor at the Technology and Operations Management Department, at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. His research focuses on health & humanitarian logistics, with a particular focus on disaster relief logistics and access to essential medicines and health services in LMICs. Harwin has collaborated closely with more than twenty humanitarian/ health organizations, studying how key decisions in health/ humanitarian supply chains affect patients or beneficiaries and how they could be improved. Harwin won several prizes with his research, including the 2023 Paul Kleindorfer best paper award and the 2021 ERIM Award for Outstanding Performance by a Young Researcher and  published academic papers in leading scientific journals, including Production and Operations Management and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. Harwin also serves on the board of the POMS College of Humanitarian Operations & Crisis Management (HOCM). Before joining RSM, Harwin worked at INSEAD (France) as postdoctoral researcher and manager of the INSEAD Humanitarian Research Group and obtained a PhD degree in Operations Research from the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Informations sur le séminaire : 

Improving access to family planning (FP) services is key to achieving many of the United Nations sustainable development goals and is frequently labelled a “development best buy”. Despite that, the need for family planning goes unmet for at least 218 million women, and funding to address this is stagnating. As such, optimizing the use of available family planning resources is key. In this talk, we will discuss opportunities for OR/OM to contribute to this pursuit. We will discuss the main challenges FP providers face, argue that OR/OM is well-positioned to help address them, and illustrate this using several recent research projects on family planning outreach teams.