As Hospitals Close and Doctors Flee, Sudan’s Health Care System Is Collapsing

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The Sudanese doctors’ union posted a message on Facebook several times a day listing the number of hospitals still operating in Khartoum, or an emergency alert for doctors to report to field hospitals set up in homes across the city.

Not far from the hospital, the medical staff had to use their wits and whatever tools they could find to treat the wounded.

In the field hospital in Al Mamoura, Dr. Mohamed Karrar improvised an intercostal drainage system using a sterilized soda bottle to pump blood from the lungs of a shot victim. A long stint in the trauma ward of the now-closed Ibrahim Malik Teaching Hospital in central Khartoum helped prepare him, but Dr. Karrar now has to contend with the sounds of war while working in a living room that has been converted into an operating room.

“I know there is danger in the area,” he said, “but the sick and wounded need me.”

In Al Nada, one of the few hospitals still operating, medical workers take cover several times a day, hiding with patients on beds and tables from aerial bombardment and heavy artillery fire. Everyone became restless, said Dr. Mohamed Fath, a doctor there, said that the sound of the oxygen tube being opened could send the staff running.

Al Nada, a private facility, now offers free pediatric services, thanks to a donation from the Sudanese American Physicians Association. At the beginning of the conflict, the management of the hospital decided to treat only pregnant women and children in order to provide shelter for a small part of the more than 24,000 women who, according to the WHO, are expected to give birth in Sudan in the next few. week.

In the weeks since the war began, 220 babies have been born there, and most have survived, Dr Fath said.

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