Photo: Nurse at Atareb Hospital, via the Hand in Hand For Syria Facebook page.
From today’s issue of the Observer, Syria charity blames red tape for closure of Aleppo hospital, by Tracy McVeigh:
All staff at a hospital serving the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo have been given a month's notice after a British medical charity blamed red tape for its closure.Read the rest.
Half a million people in the war-torn country will lose access to desperately needed healthcare when Atareb hospital, operated by the British-based aid agency Hand in Hand for Syria (HIHS), closes within the next few days.
It would be a disaster for local people as well as for the medical staff, who included some of the last remaining doctors in Syria, and their families, said the charity’s head of logistics, Fadi al-Dairi, speaking from the Syrian-Turkish border.
He said the charity has enough money from donors to keep the hospital running, but cannot get it into the country, because it needs a partner to channel the funding, and established charities are pulling out of Syria.
“It's because of bureaucracy, red tape,” he added. “We have the expertise, but not the experience.”
Al-Dairi said the charity was unable to apply for help from the UK’s Department for International Development or a UN agency because it had not been running for three years. “We only set up to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Syria, so of course we are not yet three years old. We have been begging for help, but have had no firm commitment from any of the bigger aid agencies, whom we need to get the money we have to where it needs to be.
“Already all the aid agencies are only meeting 20% of the need within Syria. The loss of this hospital is a tragedy, especially when hospitals inside Syria are being bombed every day.”
The EU reported in May that since the crisis began, 200,000 people have died in Syria because of the lack of healthcare, far more than the 164,000 thought to have been killed in fighting.
The hospital is just 20 miles from Aleppo, one of the hardest-hit areas of Syria. It provides free care to anyone, regardless of political or faith affiliation. The hospital became well-known to British audiences after a BBC Panorama programme, Saving Syria’s Children, was screened last September, and showed the hospital treating casualties from an incendiary bomb attack on a school.
Omar Gabbar, an NHS consultant from Leicester who leads the British medical team for HIHS and has worked at Atareb, said the consequences of the hospital’s closure would be dire: “About half of all Syrian hospitals have already been damaged or destroyed, and Aleppo only has 143 doctors remaining out of a pre-conflict 2,500. Around half a million people, over a huge area, will have no access to treatment for conflict injuries or ongoing normal medical conditions…”
Hand in Hand for Syria’s campaign page for Atareb Hospital.
From 12th June at Syria Deeply, Syria ER: Out of Cash, a Hospital Is Forced to Close, Dr. Rola Hallam, one of Hand in Hand’s British-Syrian volunteers, talks to Karen Leigh. An excerpt:
Our health care has all but been totally destroyed except for pockets in areas under government control in Aleppo and Damascus. It’s been almost annihilated. The main reason for that has been the specific systematic targeting by the Syrian government of hospitals, health-care facilities and health-care workers. We as Syrian doctors have been saying for nearly three years now that health care is being used as a weapon of war and that the very people meant to be protected by all warring parties are being sought out and targeted.Read the rest.
We’re closing because of a lack of funding. The hospital costs between $60,000 and $70,000 a month to operate, depending on our field costs. This is quite cheap for three operating theaters, an emergency room and 55 inpatient beds, but it’s a lot for a small charity. It has massive repercussions for our Syrian medical staff and for the approximately 5,000 patients we see every month. And, of course, for the greater population around us that knew it had access to our services.
In terms of geography, it’s in an opposition area and there’s no aid going into that area. It’s under daily shelling from the air, and it’s an area that has a lot of casualties. It’s also highly populated because there’s a high level of displacement into these [rural] areas. That’s why we set up the hospital there to begin with. And in addition, a [large] hospital in Bab al-Hawa was damaged a couple of days ago. [With the closure] the options will be even more limited. People will have to go to the border areas, or Turkey, or back into Aleppo, to seek treatment.
The services we provide at this hospital in particular are very important. Lots of the health care has been shifted from proper hospitals to field hospitals, where we can’t do inpatient treatment, mother and baby health care or most surgery. There’s war-related surgery, and then there’s non-war-related surgery. People still need to have an appendectomy. Our hospital has a dialysis unit. It’s one of only a few such units still functioning in Syria, and so its closure has huge repercussions.
And again, the campaign page is here.
Hand in Hand For Syria, on Twitter as @hands4Syr, and on Facebook here.
