Pre-GA : Health Care in Disaster + Humanitarian action
Pre-GA so far has been quite an experience. I honestly didn’t know what to expect since it was my first time attending one and my first time in Turkey, but the greeting was far beyond what I imagined. Turkish people have really impressed me with their hospitality. The team of officials that are organizing the pre-GA have been so nice and helpful with everything. All the sessions are taking place at the Acibadem University in Istanbul which is a very impressive and modern location.
I have been participating in the pre-GA workshop on “Health Care in Disasters”. At first we defined basic concepts at the core of humanitarian action and disasters, they presented us an easy formula synthesizing most of it which is the following: Disaster Risk= , according to the formula increasing a population’s capacity decreases its vulnerability and hence reduces the disaster risk. Disaster risk management has four critical components which are risk identification, recovery, prevention and preparedness. Afterwards we had a presentation given by the Turkish Red Crescent, the largest humanitarian organization in Turkey, which explained in details the organism’s different missions, especially its role in the Syrian war and the humanitarian action in Turkey.
A student for Sweden, Anna, animated a very interesting discussion on human rights, on its meaning as well as the legal history behind it. In this workshop we divided the human rights into two categories one being more about civil and political rights such as the right to expression, to dignity, against discrimination and so on, versus the other category being composed of vital rights to sustain basic needs such as the rights to food, education and health.
It made me reflect upon the importance to address the human rights because they define the vulnerability of a population.
Again on that first intense day of pre-GA, we had a workshop about designing a safe hospital in a given location at risk of specific disasters.
On the second day of the pre-GA, we had a disaster stimulation game (type video game) which was facilitated by the doctor Luca Ragazzoni specialized in disaster management and preparedness. It was a very cool activity that I enjoyed and learned a lot from. The stimulation was a plane crash that forced us to reflect on our ability to react in specific circumstances and to asses safely a situation. We got introduced to different methodologies to proceed to a rapid and effective triage in order to find the “red” patient tagged as an emergency case.
Furthermore, we had an external doctor from Medecin Sans Frontières (MSF) that came to present us the challenges of humanitarian action in the fields as well as a rising problem which is the medical care under attack in disregard of humanitarian law which represents a challenge for humanitarian action.
After writing all of this and this being just a small part of what I learned throughout the last two days I realise how much I actually learned. The most fun part is that learning during pre-GA workshops has been very interactive and stimulating since at the same time you are discussing with international students.
Weronika Jakubowska