He proposed that demographers help assistance teams to know how to make them more precise and also more applicable to specific situations. He distinguished between the acute phase and the stabilization phase. It is nearly impossible to do traditional household surveys because there are no actual households and there is not enough time to process this type of data. Once the acute phase has passed and the population begins to stabilize, it is both easier and more important to conduct sample surveys. Although people may not be living in actual households, they can be surveyed in their living arrange- ments.
Child mortality is a good general indicator of overall population health.
Even 2 to 3 years after a crisis has ended, large sample surveys with detailed birth and migration histories can be very useful for learning more about mortality dynamics among forced migrants. It is assumed that refugees are at the highest risk of mortality immediately after their arrival in a host country. They have often traveled long distances, sometimes on foot, without enough food, water, or medical care. During this first phase of a crisis, epidemiologists often find it useful to express the crude mortal- ity rate as the number of deaths per 10,000 persons per day. This work could be done by studying data on births and deaths from past crises.