Health Workers

Medical doctors in Ekiti State have decried the increasing rate of insecurity among health workers in the state. This is against the backdrop of the recent waves of kidnapping of doctors and health workers in the state. On Thursday, unknown gunmen abducted a former Chief Medical Director of Ekiti State University Teaching Hospital (EKSUTH), Dr. Patrick Adegun, and his wife, Kikelomo. The abduction is coming five days after a senior nurse with the Federal Medical Centre, Ido Ekiti, Mrs Margaret Aladeneka, was abducted while a yet-to-be identified man was killed during the operation.

Providing or seeking health care in a conflict zone is a perilous undertaking. Every year health workers are kidnapped, threatened, tortured, and killed. Hospitals and clinics are targeted and bombed. Patients are shot. In Syria alone, 187 health facilities have been attacked since March 2011, and 615 health workers were killed—141 of them by torture and execution. One doctor has made health care in conflict the center of his work.

Last December, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution affirming protection from violence for medical personnel, patients, and health facilities. The resolution reveals the extraordinary challenges of providing care in conflict zones. The Reporter talked with Widney Brown, director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights, about the problem of violence against health workers and the importance of committing to medical neutrality.

“An airstrike destroys the paediatric and premature baby section of a hospital killing, among others, five babies and three mothers. A health-care centre occupied by security forces for days, preventing patients’ access to medical treatment. A clearly marked ambulance misused for an arrest operation. A doctor threatened not to treat wounded combatants of an armed group”. The data on these and other incidents were collected by the ICRC in 11 countries from January 2012 to December 2014 and published in a report, uncovering the untold suffering that violence against health care is causing to thousands.

This week I took an online course offered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) about health care responsibilities in times of conflict. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to consider the ethics of being a health worker in a war situation in today’s disturbing reality of what war is. There is one especially harrowing and dramatic video clip in the course: it shows the 2009 graduation ceremony of a group of Somali doctors—the first to graduate in many years. And as we look at the young doctors, proud in their robes, there is an explosion that cuts off the speaker and the picture—and then the scene is one of bodies everywhere.