Overcoming the Challenges of the Humanitarian Crisis: Prioritizing Access to Trauma, Emergency Care and Mental Health Services
The current humanitarian crisis has created a critical shortage of trauma and emergency care drugs, medical supplies, laboratory equipment, and medical kits. Hospitals and ambulance services also lack sufficient electricity or fuel supplies to continue providing lifesaving services. Access to essential primary and secondary healthcare services is crucial for the general population, especially vulnerable groups such as women, children, chronic illness patients, and survivors of gender-based violence. To address these needs, priority response activities include maximizing and supporting trauma care services at pre-hospital, hospital, and post-hospital levels. Providing early access to postoperative care and rehabilitation services is crucial for the injured. Establishing Emergency Medical Teams at key hospitals and setting up field hospitals are also key response activities.
In addition to these efforts, addressing mental health and psychosocial support is necessary for the highly traumatized population. Supporting the capacity of existing primary and secondary healthcare services is also a high priority. This includes treatment of illnesses, management of non-communicable diseases, nutrition interventions, sexual and reproductive health services, maternal and child health services, and care for GBV survivors. Re-establishing referral pathways and scaling up disease surveillance and response capacity for communicable diseases are crucial to prevent outbreaks in overcrowded shelters due to poor water and sanitation conditions.
Lastly, maintaining essential supplies at community and facility levels is important for continued service delivery during the crisis. Without adequate resources such as drugs, medical supplies, electricity or fuel supply it becomes challenging to provide quality healthcare services which affects not only the immediate needs but also long term recovery of the affected population. Therefore it’s important that governments prioritize these needs in order to ensure that people have access to the care they need during this difficult time.
