LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — Doctors Without Borders hospitals in Afghanistan continue to persevere despite increasingly intense and widespread challenges affecting its supplies, staffing, facilities and sometimes including strained ties with Western powers and local forces. Among these hospitals is the Doctors Without Borders Boost hospital.
The Boost hospital is a 300-bed facility in notoriously dangerous southern Helmand province in that region’s Lashkar Gah district. According to Doctors Without Borders, the international medical charity also known by its French acronym, MSF, Boost hospital is the sole public provider of specialized pediatric care. Poorer Afghans from across the province flock to the free hospital. Though private facilities exist, they cost far too much than the poor can afford.
Like much of Afghanistan, Helmand province has seen its most catastrophic fighting pass years ago. But serious clashes between Afghani security forces and Taliban militants continue to occur in districts and cities nearby Lashkar Gah. The often intense flare-ups in fighting cause delays for patients trying to reach the hospital and many patients cannot reach the hospital at all. Doctors Without Borders estimates that during periods of fighting, emergency room admittances can drop by 30 percent. Those who can make the journey often find the time it takes to travel to the hospital skyrocket to as many as six hours.
Boost hospital and others throughout the country have long been forced to deal with myriad and sometimes unforeseeable problems since Doctors Without Borders first arrived in Afghanistan in 1980. Late last year, a Doctors Without Borders run hospital in Afghanistan’s northern city of Kunduz came under attack by a U.S. AC-130 gunship which was assisting coalition forces battling Taliban militants nearby. Despite the organization’s meticulously-followed policy of notifying all armed parties of their location, the attack on the Kunduz hospital killed at least 42 people. The Associated Press reports that the attack lasted at least 30 minutes before the apparent targeting mistake was realized.
The attack, though particularly hard-hitting, was but another in similarly demoralizing setbacks that Doctors Without Borders has experienced in Afghanistan since the War on Terror began following the 9/11 terror attacks. The New York Times notes that Doctors Without Borders has also seen tragedies and difficulties during 2004 and 2009.
Though Doctors Without Borders left Kunduz in the aftermath of the 2015 attack, it is likely to return given its ethos of neutrality and commitment to the quality medical treatment of all parties involved in conflicts, especially poor civilians with no other viable reprieve available to them. Similarly, the setbacks faced by Boost hospital officials and doctors are unlikely to permanently halt the organization.
Workers at the Doctors Without Borders Boost hospital, both Afghan and foreign, have expressed commitment to helping arriving patients despite the challenges. As part of a series of reports on Boost hospital, Doctors Without Borders recounts the story of a seven-year-old boy who was revealed to be suffering from a lung infection, tuberculosis and a displaced hip. Boost hospital’s critically important pediatric intensive care unit was able to correct all of the boy’s ailments.
The organization has remarked that the “young boy’s case shows that even when a case is serious and a patient reaches the hospital late, there is still hope” for similar cases at the Doctors Without Borders Boost hospital and hospitals elsewhere.
– James Collins
Photo: Flickr