Operational research during the Ebola emergency. Operations Research (OR) is an approach used to improve service delivery or to strengthen other aspects of programs. Our positions on these controversies all follow from our identification of ‘meaningful engagement’ as a central feature of Community OR. Operational research has provided detailed information on the clinical signs and symptoms of infected patients arriving at ETCs (2-6), which has allowed health professionals to anticipate what they should look for when assessing patients. We then move on to discuss four other controversies that have implications for the future development of Community OR and its relationship with its parent discipline: the desire for Community OR to be more explicitly political claims that it should be grounded in the theory, methodology and practice of systems thinking the similarities and differences between the UK and US traditions and the extent to which Community OR offers an enhanced understanding of practice that could be useful to OR more generally. Community operational research is a child of the wider operational research (OR) movement, and the history of its emergence and institutionalization has been extensively documented (e.g., Carter et al., 1987, Johnson, 2012a, Mar Molinero, 1992, Midgley and Ochoa-Arias, 2004a, Parry and Mingers, 1991, Ritchie, 1994, Ritchie et al., 1994a ). While it has been persuasively argued that Community OR cannot be defined by its clients, practitioners or methods, we argue that the common concern of all Community OR practice is the meaningful engagement of communities, whatever form that may take – and the legitimacy of different forms of engagement may be open to debate. Formulating the Problem: The problem must be first clearly defined. In this paper, we tackle the controversial issue of how it can be differentiated from other forms of OR. Operation Research, is a scientific approach for decision-making, and therefore must follow following steps: 1.
Community Operational Research (Community OR) has been an explicit sub-domain of OR for more than 30 years.