Health Cluster Guide: A Practical Handbook

This Health cluster guide advises how the health cluster lead agency, coordinator and partners can work together during a humanitarian crisis to achieve the aims of reducing avoidable mortality, morbidity and disability, and restoring the delivery of and equitable access to preventive and curative health care.

It highlights key principles of humanitarian health action and how coordination and joint efforts among health and other sector actors working in partnership can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of health interventions and promote better health outcomes. It draws on Inter-Agency Standing Committee and other documents but also includes lessons from field experience.

Although addressed to health cluster lead agencies, coordinators and partners, the guidance is equally valid for coordinators and members of health sector groups that seek to achieve effective health action in countries where the cluster approach has not been formally adopted.

Throughout the Health cluster guide, the term “health cluster” may refer to “health cluster or sector coordination group”.

The guide should be useful in different humanitarian crisis contexts, including sudden onset and slow onset crises and protracted emergencies. It does not address all the specificities of the different contexts.