What ' s Not a Target

August 17, 2017Health workers are supposed to save lives and health facilities are supposed to be safe places for health and healing. They ’re protected by the rules of war, but are still being attacked.Health workers.It was really hard for me to get my head around at first —that someone would deliberately harm a health worker. A nurse, a doctor, a midwife. A community health worker delivering polio vaccines. Someone who spent years studying, practicing, sacrificing to save lives.I mean when Imeet a health worker, I ’m often tongue-tied. They practically have celebrity status. They’re doing something meaningful with their lives, every day.Or the facilities they work in.But from my cubicle and laptop, on social media and across the Internet, I read reports of health workers being harmed, or their facilities or clients attacked, every week. Sometimes more often.   Here are just a few incidents in the past month that I ’ve spotted, often because the posts about them include #NotATarget (a hashtag campaign started by the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, two years ago):Six Red Cross volunteers died after being attacked during a crisis meeting at a health facility in the Central African Republic.In the West Bank, Israeli forces stormed aPalestinian hospital, terrifying staff and clients, and prevented doctors from providing emergency medical care to critically injured patients.In Afghanistan,35 civilians died as a result of an attack during which the T...
Source: IntraHealth International - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Source Type: news