Doctors aim to save even more lives
DOCTORS Without Borders (MSF) has said it will be expanding and improving its work across all its projects in 2020.
MSF teams provide medical and humanitarian assistance to people in over 70 countries, including for medical humanitarian issues such as the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), treating the war-wounded in Yemen, and offering care to GBV survivors.
The improvements will be made in the fields of trauma care, maternal healthcare, outbreaks, new models for saving people critically ill with HIV, and paediatrics, it said.
“There are many critically wounded people we are not able to save; they die before they arrive at our gates. By training the people who transport the wounded to our health centres and hospitals on how to keep these people alive, we want to save more lives,” said MSF Dr Lynette Dominguez.
Dr Severine Caluwaerts, said while medical assistance during childbirth was another way to save lives, family planning was also of vital importance. “By avoiding unplanned pregnancies, we can avoid a lot of death and suffering.”
Dr Marc Biot said MSF developed models of care in the 1990s to treat patients in low-resource settings and brought down HIV mortality. “But today, a million people die every year of HIV-related diseases. We need to develop new models and implement them in more places, to save lives.”
Most MSF patients are children with acute illnesses, but many have overlooked chronic conditions, said Dr Kemi Ogundipe. “We want to focus more on that.”