The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

This is the field hospital that Spain will deploy in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria

2023-02-07T14:56:10.129Z


The humanitarian emergency response medical team, with surgical capacity, will travel to a location yet to be determined to care for those injured in the earthquake after the appeal for help launched by the Turkish authorities


This Tuesday, more than 300 professionals from the public health system, firefighters, cooks and logistics experts have received a message on their mobile phones asking them to travel to the humanitarian emergency triggered by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, which has also left affected in Lebanon and Iraq.

They will answer with a yes or a no and in no more than 72 hours, at least 70 of them will travel to a destination yet to be decided, and they will build, in 48 hours, a field hospital with surgical capacity.

There are barely 12 other teams with such a level of operation around the world.

Spanish has already intervened, since its launch in 2018, in humanitarian missions in Mozambique, Bata (Equatorial Guinea) and in the earthquake in Haiti in August 2021.

START, as this emergency medical response team is known, is a project of the Spanish Agency for Development Cooperation (AECID), which confirms that preparations have already begun, in response to the request for international help from of the Turkish authorities to care for the injured, which, according to the latest data, exceeds 20,000 in Turkey alone.

File image of the START field hospital when deployed in Madrid in 2018.Miguel Lizana (AECID)

"The preparations for the deployment have already begun and the team will leave for a location yet to be defined in the coming days," said a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The final location depends on the decision of the Government of Turkey, which has accepted the Spanish offer, which has been coordinated with the UN and the European Union (EU) to avoid aid overlaps in certain areas and neglect of others.

More information

Latest news of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria

START can offer advanced medical assistance in disaster contexts since it was certified by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2018.

In the EU, only Italy and France have teams with similar characteristics and the capacity to perform surgical operations.

The Spanish hospital can, specifically, care for up to 200 people a day, has 20 beds to hospitalize patients (10 women and 10 men with separate wards) and is prepared for up to seven major and 15 minor surgeries to be carried out in one day.

The team that leaves in the next few days will remain on the ground for two weeks and will be relieved by another 70 team members.

For this, the field hospital, which weighs 30 tons and occupies 200 cubic meters packed, will be loaded on two planes and will be installed at the destination in two days by the group of medical professionals and experts in coordination and logistics.

The final complex will occupy an area of ​​100 x 75 metres, with a kitchen to serve 150 meals a day, and a water filtering system (up to 5,000 liters per hour) to guarantee the proper functioning of the hospital.

The team that leaves in the next few days will remain in the field for two weeks and will be relieved by another 70 members of the START team, who have been trained to work in humanitarian crisis conditions.

Most of them already have the experience acquired in previous interventions.

"In the first moments of an emergency caused by seismic movements, the speed of the rescue teams is essential with the aim of saving the greatest number of lives of people who have been trapped under the rubble," stressed Foreign Affairs in the statement in which confirms that Spain will mobilize this hospital, in addition to supporting the International Federation of the Red Cross.

The Spanish Cooperation will also support “Spanish humanitarian NGOs that maintain emergency agreements with the AECID and are currently working in Syria”, he added.

This means that it will transfer funds to the organizations so that they have additional resources to respond to the exceptional needs of this catastrophe that add, in the case of northern Syria, to the previous precarious situation of food insecurity and poverty.

You can follow PLANETA FUTURO on

Twitter

,

Facebook

and

Instagram

, and subscribe

here

to our 'newsletter'

.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-02-07

You may like

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.