Violence

A new report, entitled “Ambulance and pre-hospital services in risk situations,” sets out ways to make pre-hospital care and ambulance services operating in areas of armed violence safer. The report was unveiled today at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent statutory meetings in Sydney, Australia.

Fear and secrecy have cloaked the roll-out of a polio campaign currently underway in northern Nigeria. Vaccinators are concealing their identities, hiding vaccinations under their veils and visiting some areas only with undercover armed guards, following the February murder by Boko Haram of nine polio workers in the northern city of Kano.

In Syria today, there are many storms and relatively few moments of calm. I was enjoying a rare moment of peace, a time to exhale. It was a hot, balmy late afternoon on 26 August and I was sitting on the hospital balcony overlooking the olive groves. The sun was tipping into descent promising respite from its heat. Away from my comfort zone as an emergency medicine doctor in London, I was working in a northern Syrian hospital under the umbrella Hand in Hand for Syria – an aid group – and being followed by a BBC Panorama team, that was looking into the impact of the war on children.

The International Committee of the Red Cross presents this event, which includes a briefing by Pierre Gentile, Head of Unit for Protection of Civilian Populations, on ICRC’s Health Care in Danger initiative. Increasing attacks on health care workers have impacted millions of people worldwide.

At the end of 2008, Dr. Dirhem Al-Qadasi, the head of the emergency room at the Science and Technology Hospital in Sana’a, a private health care facility, was stabbed to death. Those responsible for his murder are believed to be family members of an elderly man who died while at the hospital who were seeking revenge for the man’s death. According to former patients and colleagues, the doctor had a sterling reputation. News of Al-Qadasi’s death caused a media storm and popular outrage, but no one was ever tried for the doctor’s murder.