Highlights
• UNHCR Delivers Essential Medicines for 23,000 IDPs • First UNHCR Supported Community Center in Lattakia Officially Opens • Two millionth Beneficiary Reached with CRIs • UNHCR team Visits Health Clinic in Hama
UNHCR Delivers Essential Medicines for 23,000 Internally Displaced Patients
The conflict in Syria has resulted in limited access to health clinics, delayed access to health care, the discontinuation of treatment and follow up, limited access to clean water and sanitation as well as interrupted vaccination programmes. The impact of the current crisis on the populations’ health and wellbeing is complicated and far reaching. It includes permanent disabilities, potential risk of women delivering without being able to reach clinics and/or receive postnatal care, complications and high rate of mortality in patients with chronic diseases, epidemic outbreaks of water and food-borne diseases, outbreaks of vaccines-preventable diseases and psychological trauma and mental health.
UNHCR has responded by providing primary health care services and emergency life-saving medical and surgical interventions to respond to the population’s health needs through its implementing partners as well as national authorities, national associations and international partners to reduce suffering and minimize mortality rate in Syria. In November, in one such intervention, UNHCR donated essential primary healthcare medicines valued at over US$1.4 million to its implementing partner SARC which will be distributed to the pharmacies in ten SARC polyclinics and medical points in Damascus, Rural Damascus, Homs, Tartous and Aleppo. More than 23,000 internally displaced persons will benefit from this free assistance on a monthly basis will be used to treat a range of the most common acute and chronic diseases such as coronary arteries disease (CAD), diabetes, arthritis, asthma, epilepsy, upper and lower respiratory infections, enteritis, ophthalmology infections, gastric ulcers, scabies and lice as well as mental problems.