IBME wins UZH Global Champion Fund for a network on the ethics of humanitarian triage and medical evacuation with WHO as a partner organisation

The Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine (IBME) has been awarded funding from the UZH Global Funding Scheme (Global Champion Fund) for the project “Saving Lives in Humanitarian Crises: A Multilateral Network on the Ethics of Triage and Medical Evacuation”. The project runs from January 2027 to December 2028, with the World Health Organization as partner organisation.

In humanitarian crises, decisions about who is treated and who is evacuated are made at two connected levels: by teams in the field, and by the funders, states and organisations that determine how much care and evacuation capacity is available in the first place. The project builds on IBME’s SNSF-funded project “Ethics of Triage” (2022–2025) and on its recent work on humanitarian triage.

As a WHO Collaborating Centre, IBME serves as the academic anchor of a network that brings together the WHO Global Health Ethics Team, the WHO Collaborating Centres in Bioethics, ethics experts from Médecins Sans Frontières and the Swiss Red Cross, and academic partners in Switzerland, Egypt and Canada. The network combines bioethics, public health, humanitarian medicine and social psychology. Its aim is to contribute to the development of WHO guidance on ethics in humanitarian crises, in particular on triage and medical evacuation.