Four years ago working in Timor Leste, I experienced the devastating effects of dengue fever and malaria on families in a resource-poor environment. Waving mosquitos away from my face, I took blood tests and treated a cohort of sick children lying in their parents’ arms, lethargic and flat in the Emergency Department. I wondered what […]
As the G20 summit draws to an end, we hope that global leaders will push ahead with confronting the problems that mean that people across the world have limited access to medical tools and effective drugs. The MSF Access Campaign, which launched in 1999, winning the Nobel Prize, has had some success stories, but so […]
Landmines are a deadly legacy of many past and present conflicts and still kill around 15-20,000 people around the world every year and maim many more. Most casualties suffer traumatic lower limb injuries caused by the blast although facial injuries and hand amputations are also common. Last month, we held the first successful meeting of trauma surgeons from […]
‘When it comes to safety for patients in the operating theatre, it’s not always the ‘big spends’ that make the biggest difference. For instance, the World Health Organization has developed a one-page safety checklist for surgical teams which maximises the chances of a good outcome – regardless of the geographic or economic setting. This Surgical Safety […]
I have just returned from my first mission with Medicins Sans Frontieres in the Yemen and I can definitely say it was a life-changing experience. I was working in the emergency department of a hospital in the north for three and a half months. The biggest difference between working in an A&E in an NHS hospital in Manchester and […]
Looking at the grainy image of an NHS doctor in his blues pointing to the sky in the Isis salute has left me feeling angry and ashamed. The Facebook image of British citizen Issam Abuanza, 37, who joined Isis in Syria in 2014, are deeply troubling and not because he is a medic in a […]
Aaminah Verity is a volunteer doctor who works with the international healthcare charity, Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde). She recently spent six weeks on the Greek island of Chios, working in the charity’s mobile clinic, aka the “Medibus”, and also spent time at a static clinic situated in one of the main refugee […]
What do you do when there are no hospitals and there is a desperate need? You bring an oversize inflator and create a working hospital out of thin air in less than 24 hours. This is what happened in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 and also in Tacloban City in 2013 after the typhoon […]
Like many doctors in the UK, I wanted to take time out of my career in the NHS to do voluntary work. Sadly, like many people, I found that I had to choose between my NHS job and working in a crisis zone. In my case, I chose to join Médecins Sans Frontieres four years […]
Back in January when I first had the idea of a march to protest against the targeting of healthcare workers in warzones, I couldn’t have imagined how bad things would be by the time we gathered in Trafalgar Square on Saturday 7 May. We marched – doctors, families, medical students, activists, experts and supporters – […]