Innovations in Humantiarian Action: How a Canadian tent designed for the Arctic can improve MSF patient care in hot places

This article appears in the Spring 2015 issue of Dispatches, the MSF Canada magazine.

The ice and snow of the Canadian Arctic and the sweltering interior of a Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) treatment centre in Africa don’t seem like two environments with much in common. But a new project spearheaded by MSF Canada aims to use technology designed for one climate to help save lives in another — putting cold-weather ingenuity to work in the hot-weather regions where MSF often works.

The innovation starts with a simple form of technology: a tent. Tents are crucial pieces of equipment in many MSF emergency medical interventions, but they are not without drawbacks, especially in hot climates. Because they trap heat, tents can be problematic for the storage of temperature-sensitive medicines, and can cause discomfort for staff and patients alike. This last problem is especially striking when it comes to managing infectious diseases, such as the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa or other highly contagious illnesses. To cut the risk of viral transmission, patients must often be isolated and doctors required to wear hot and heavy personal protective equipment (PPE) at all times. As the Ebola response has shown, all that heat can have a direct impact on patient care.

“The problem is that you can only really spend at most 40 to 45 minutes dealing with patients before the heat in the suit gets too much and you start running the risk of making mistakes,” says Dr. Tim Jagatic, an MSF physician from Windsor, Ontario, who has been at the forefront of MSF’s Ebola response in Guinea and Sierra Leone. “At that point you have to leave the ward and remove your PPE, which seriously reduces the amount of effective time you can spend actually treating patients.”

Ralph Ohnmacht/MSF

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From north to south

Enter Design Shelter Inc., a Canadian company that specializes in making insulated tents for use in the Arctic. The same principle that allows people inside the tents to stay warm in spite of frigid temperatures outside can also be applied in reverse to hot-weather climates — a notion that caught the attention of MSF’s Toronto office.

“The strict safety protocols MSF uses when responding to infectious disease outbreaks, like the ones in place at our Ebola treatment centres in West Africa, are designed to ensure there is as little chance as possible for viral transmission,” says Jonathan Jennings, the deputy executive director at MSF Canada. “That means our medical staff must wear full PPE at all times — the space suits you see in media coverage of the Ebola crisis — and in a field-hospital setting that heat can get overwhelming. If we can find a way to moderate those temperatures, it will have a direct impact on levels of care for our patients.”

While back in Canada recently, Dr. Jagatic observed a demonstration of Design Shelter’s tent in Mississauga, Ontario, and liked what he saw. Not only did the structures offer advanced thermal insulation, which can greatly improve temperature control in the field, but a modular design and lightweight material mean the tents can be expandable, transportable and possible to set up within 30 minutes — ideal for emergency settings. More significantly, the tents have the potential to be fully decontaminated, which would mark a great improvement over current practices.

“Right now the tents we’re using at our Ebola treatment centres have to be burned when we’re finished with them, because they can’t be entirely decontaminated,” says Jennings. “That’s a concern for a number of different reasons, which is why this technology is important for us to consider.”

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New partners, new ideas

MSF Canada cultivated a unique partnership with a new donor willing to fund innovation work, and then customized the insulated tents to meet the medical needs in the type of contexts where MSF works. The next step will be to pilot the tents in an infectious disease scenario where MSF thinks they will be most useful.

“When Ebola struck last year, it was all hands on deck for MSF’s response,” says Jennings, “and these tents represented a possible way for us to help meet some of the specific challenges in the field. But they are also something that can be used in a variety of different contexts where MSF works, and we believe they will have an immediate impact on our ability to respond to future disease outbreaks. By connecting with new partners and working with our donors, we can try to create new solutions that will improve our ability to save lives.”

• Read the Spring 2015 issue of Dispatches, the MSF Canada magazine