Sean Healy
Authors: Andrew Green
Journal: The Lancet (2024)

Humanitarian who worked for Médecins Sans Frontières. Born in Singapore on Feb 17, 1972, he died in Melbourne, VIC, Australia, on Nov 26, 2023, aged 51 years. As a humanitarian working primarily with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Sean Healy's perpetual curiosity led him to scrutinise both the work of the non-governmental organisation and the role of the wider humanitarian system. “Sean had an absolutely brilliant way of looking at things from all different angles”, said Reshma Adatia, formerly the International Operations Coordinator and Head of Humanitarian Diplomacy for MSF. He brought an “understanding of the humanitarian sector that was not just from the strategic level, but that was really nuanced”. Healy's final role, as Head of Reflection and Analysis for MSF, offered him an outlet for that curiosity, as he considered different facets of the sector—for example, the importance of neutrality or why aid organisations were missing from some of the most difficult emergencies—and then offered recommendations to help reshape the response. “He always pushed for MSF to reflect on its practices”, said Sandrine Tiller, MSF's Humanitarian Access and Networking Team Coordinator. “A lot of his work was holding up a mirror to MSF, itself.” Born in Singapore, but raised in Australia, Healy joined the Socialist Workers Party, later the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), and its youth group, Resistance, as a teenager. He would serve as a National Executive member of the DSP and National Coordinator of Resistance. At the University of Sydney he earned a master's degree in political economy in 2004. Around the same time, Healy transitioned away from politics and into the humanitarian field, joining MSF as a Press Officer in Sydney in 2002. “That social activism blended in with the medical activism of MSF”, said Tom Roth, a Melbourne, Australia-based Principal Consultant at Aspen Medical Advisory Services. “He was always someone who was very intellectual in his response to what was going on.” For MSF, Healy would work in Burundi, help respond to the 2005 earthquake in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, and then join a mission in Quetta, Pakistan, where he “helped that project on the border of Afghanistan”, said Roth, who worked with Healy in several different international settings for MSF. “He was able to help bring us more into interaction in the environment around us”, Roth said. In August, 2008, Healy became Head of Mission in Laos for MSF, where he was based in the capital, Vientiane. “He was building some operational experience, but he was passionate about understanding the social and political consequences of disasters, wars, and their impact on individuals”, Roth said. “That threaded well with his later career, where he was writing more around the issues affecting humanitarian response.” After a 19-month stint as Programme Coordinator in Tibet for the Australian Red Cross, Healy moved to Berlin, Germany, in 2010 to become a Humanitarian Affairs Advisor for MSF. “He had a special talent for mobilising people and getting them to look in the same direction”, said Victoria Russell, Operational Communications Advisor at MSF. Healy's innate curiosity translated into an “interest in everybody who came across his path”, Adatia said. “He was not hierarchical, he was not superficial, he was genuinely engaged and interested.” In 2015, Healy became an adviser for MSF on issues related to access to medicines, vaccines, and other medical products. “He was passionate, not just about wars and disasters, but about how drugs were developed globally and how they’re shared around the world”, Roth said. In 2018, Healy was named the first Head of Reflection and Analysis for MSF. “We’re always jumping from emergency to emergency and there needed to be a space created to ponder and reflect upon the challenges and dilemmas that we faced”, Russell said. “What happens is you lose sight of where you’re going and what's down the road. The big issues that aren’t on fire, but are so important”, said Marc DuBois, independent humanitarian consultant and Senior Fellow at SOAS University of London, UK. It became Healy's job to collaborate with people inside and outside MSF to draw attention to those issues, including questions of race and gender, but also to how MSF engaged with local authorities and to the risk of disinformation in crises. “Sean was someone who was always curious about the whole humanitarian endeavour and made people think about their work in a different way”, Tiller said. Healy is survived by his children, Luca and Patrick, and his partner, Sonya Wellhausen.