ABW Café Series

The Talk

Maternity waiting homes (MWH) constitute an effective intervention for reducing infant and mother mortality in settings where timely access by pregnant women to a skilled birth attendant is difficult. Effective MWH operations are therefore important but also challenging due to limited accommodation capacity, uncertainty of delivery dates and limited communication with patients. In collaboration with the Ministry of Health of Liberia, our research team has developed some interventions to facilitate effective MWH referral policies, that is, whether and when to assign pregnant women to an MWH based on their individual location, medical profile and locally available capacity, and facility network planning, that is, where and how much MWH capacity should be built.

About Jérémie Gallien

Professor Gallien’s research focuses on pushing the frontier of supply chain management and global health delivery through collaborations with leading firms and organisations. He has published, consulted and taught extensively in the areas of operations and supply chain management and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Management Science, Operations Research and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.

He is a native of France but has lived in the United States and the United Kingdom since 1996. Professor Gallien holds a PhD in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Engineering Degree from the École des Mines de Paris. He now works as a Professor in Management Science and Operations at the London Business School.