specialty focus
specialty focus
Nursing on the front line
A local returns to her home after the Raqqa offensive to find it in ruins. All photos: Diala Ghassan / Médecins Sans Frontières
One nurse’ s journey as a volunteer in a war zone.
By Jessica Vanderwal
14 | nursingreview. com. au
Allah yerhamu –“ God have mercy on him”. This is one of the first lines of Arabic I needed to learn after arriving in Tal Abyad Hospital in northern Syria. They are the only words of comfort to offer when supporting grieving families, something I have had to do all too often here.
I had wanted to work for Médecins Sans Frontières( MSF) for the entirety of my adult life. Now, working within this amazing team of people, I am so grateful to have finally made it. But it isn’ t all refugee camps, vaccinations and smiling children – the iconic images that spring to mind when you think of MSF. When they offered me a position in a team in northern Syria for my first assignment, I thought there must have been a mistake. But MSF needed someone with recent emergency and trauma nursing experience, so here I am.
I can’ t help but remember how I used to complain about work and life in general on a daily basis in Australia. Now, I don’ t think I’ ll ever feel entitled to complain again. It is the Syrian people, the patients and their families that I encounter each day in Tal Abyad Hospital who should feel entitled to complain, and yet they don’ t.
A typical bad shift at my hospital at home sees me on my feet for eight hours straight with no time to have a drink or grab a coffee, let alone go to the bathroom. I’ ll struggle to find space to fit the next“ priority 2” patient with chest pain. I’ ll have to wait an hour for a CT scan or to get a full list of laboratory results. We are constantly pressured and frantic, harassed to deliver care to the highest standard we can, to care for the patients and their families, while juggling admissions and discharges and meeting deadlines for patient waiting times.
But also at home, I have never found myself with a shortage of medical equipment or drug supplies, and I’ m always surrounded by a huge, well trained, specialised medical team that rotate around the clock, so at the end of my shift there are fresh faces to handover my patients to. Of course, back home we have bad days and we lose patients, but however sad and unexpected these circumstances are, I’ ve never had to tell someone their child died because an explosive device was hidden in a teddy bear, or that their wife died due to a completely treatable non‐communicable disease.
Before leaving for my mission in northern Syria, I was drawn to the news about the war, the images of air strikes, and all the political and armed groups struggling for power while the international community looked on, seemingly unable to do anything. There was seldom information shared