Armed conflict and other situations of widespread violence generate immediate and additional health-care requirements for wounded and sick people. These requirements increase at the very time when insecurity makes it more difficult to address them. A sound, intact health-care infrastructure and the safety of health-care personnel are prerequisites for the delivery of health care.
When people take up arms for whatever reason, health care is disrupted in a variety of ways: fighting prevents personnel from reaching their place of work; health-care facilities and medical vehicles are inadvertently damaged; soldiers or police forcibly enter health-care facilities looking for enemies or "criminals;" and sometimes gaining control of a hospital is an objective of fighters. In the most serious cases, health-care facilities are directly targeted, the wounded and the sick are attacked, and healthcare personnel are threatened, kidnapped, injured or killed. In brief, it may become difficult, even impossible, to provide adequate health care because of these and many other forms of insecurity.
This Health Care in Danger training module was developed by theInternational Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Nigeria in collaboration with the Association of Public Health Physicians of Nigeria (APHPN). This training module is aimed to serve as a guide and source for medical trainers in Nigerian tertiary institutions when delivering lectures on the Protection of Health Care in Nigeria.
