The COVID-19 pandemic presented obstacles to Emergency Medical Teams (EMT) deployment, including concern of exposure to COVID-19 and travel restriction in many areas of the world. Recognizing these challenges, EMTs sought alternatives to physical deployment, such as virtual deployment. However, concerns have been raised regarding access to internet in aid recipient countries, as well as patient privacy and data leakage in general due to insecure internet connections and intentional data hacking. There is limited literature, and no internationally agreed set of criteria, on the evaluation of deployment including the recipient countries’ ministries of health’s opinion on the deployments. In order to compare alternative deployment modalities, a set of criteria to evaluate an EMT deployment must be established.

The research will identify a set of criteria that can be used to evaluate a deployment; to identify the possible alternative modalities to traditional physical deployment; and to explore perceptions of acceptability and ability to meet the goals of international humanitarian assistance. A stakeholder analysis will be conducted to identify the key informants and relevant stakeholders, and the Delphi Approach will be utilized to seek experts’ opinions and reach consensus.

This research will help to establish a set of criteria for evaluating deployments, and to identify the alternative deployment modalities, the advantages, and disadvantages, and to evaluate each alternative modality, with the hopes of guiding EMTs to plan their future deployments, as well as to provide alternatives should there be further restrictions in the future.

At this moment, this research is at the planning stage and ethical approval has not yet been sought. Should this abstract be accepted, ethical approval will have been obtained, and data collection will have just started in May. The presentation will include a summary of relevant literature, the methods, and any preliminary results.