Sudden-onset disasters impact the health and well-being of millions of people each year. Typically, a sudden-onset disaster will lead to a surge of patients that require immediate acute care, even though health infrastructure and resources may be destroyed or not accessible. The challenge of patient flow logistics is transporting those in need of acute care rapidly to locations where they can be treated.

The fields and disciplines tackling these challenges, therefore, span from disaster-related to health-related logistics, but it is not known whether and how research and approaches across these fields align. In a recent study by PDPC Frontrunner 3: Pandemic lessons for flood disaster preparedness, researchers scoped this emergent field, identified research gaps and developed a conceptual framework that bridges the disaster-related and health-related logistics literature.

In a comprehensive literature review, researchers mapped out the key concepts such as actors, locations, transportation modes and decision problems used in the literature. The study identified four gaps in the existing literature:

1. The literature focuses primarily on earthquakes and terrorist attacks, limited attention is given to other sudden-onset disaster types despite their frequency;
2. The literature focuses on formal actors such as health providers or civil protection bodies, while communities are largely portrayed as passive patients or victims;
3. Actors are largely assumed to follow standardized protocols, often ignoring emergent roles or behavioral changes typical for sudden-onset disasters;
4. Objectives predominantly relate to either efficiency or effectiveness, neglecting fairness and multiobjective problems.

This scoping review is the first to explore the different aspects of patient logistics in sudden-onset disasters by bridging the disaster-related and health-related literature. With this study, researchers give clear recommendations for future research and thereby hope to guide the design of more inclusive, ethically sound and effective disaster response systems.

The study was performed by researchers from the Pandemic and Disaster Preparedness Center (PDPC), and was first published on November 18, 2025 in the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management:

Magana, J., Hinrichs-Krapels, S., Bramer, W., & Comes, T. (2025). Patient flow logistics from disaster to care: a scoping review of actors, transport modes and decision problems. Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management, 1-25.

Read the full publication here.