Background
During 2015 an important increase in the number of attacks on health care facilities has been observed.
As such, the health cluster decided to collect information to permit monitoring of the situation.
In 2012 WHO received this mandate from its member states: "to provide leadership at the global level in developing methods for systematic collection and dissemination of data on attacks on health facilities, health workers, health transports, and patients in complex humanitarian emergencies. Following this mandate they developed a global tool called MEASURES: Monitoring of Events Against Safe Use & Running of Health Services in complex emergencies to document these as well as their consequences on the access to health care services and, on the capacity of health providers to deliver care in order to inform strategic approaches for safe/safer health care delivery primarily in countries in complex emergencies.
Being in a context where attacks on health care are very frequent, the health cluster has been asked to participate in the piloting and revising of this tool by HQ. For the health cluster, being part of a global reporting system allows for a more robust methodology and more credibility while systematisation of data collection incites towards following rules for safe and ethical data management and offer increased visibility of the importance of the problematic.
The present report was issued following an unprecedented increase in the number of attacks on healthcare in one single day that occurred on Monday February 15th 2016.
Methodology
Alert reports are being entered online by the health cluster partners into a secure database with SSL encryption. All the partners submit to the database in an anonymous manner. Each incident goes into a further verification process by corroboration of the information from the different sources. After the verification process is completed, data are extracted and transferred to the statistical analysis software for cleaning, analysis and production of results, tables and graphs. Results are presented with a disaggregation according to the confirmation status of the attack. A confirmed attack implies an attack that satisfies the confirmation criteria according to the verification methodology adopted by the health cluster whereas an unconfirmed attack refers to an attack which occurrence is confirmed, however some secondary data related to the attack is yet to be confirmed (number of casualties).