Conflicts

We are also developing our work supporting the recovery of health systems affected by conflict.

Take newly independent South Sudan, which has suffered years of civil war and has some of the worst health outcome indicators globally. Such poor health outcomes are precipitated by the severe shortage of all categories of trained healthcare professionals, including physicians (1 per 65,574 population) and midwives (1 per 39,088 population compared to the UK ratio of 2.8 per 1000 population). Many healthcare workers have fled during the conflict, or had their training severely disrupted, and as such the country relies on inadequately trained or low skilled health workers.

Following a fragile peace treaty in 2018, UK-Med conducted a needs assessment with hospital staff to identify training requirements for health workers in frontline facilities. Management of trauma, reproductive health and outbreak response were identified as key areas of concern. To address this we have used specialist teams of NHS professionals selected and trained by UK-Med for a humanitarian context to deliver a series of training courses.