Health Care in Danger: An issue for our times

Organizers

International Committee of the Red Cross in partnership with Getty Images

About the exhibition

• Violence against health care through the ages: A guided tour

Second World War, London: nurses holding newborn babies in their hands look with horror at a bombed maternity. Next to it, a similar image, taken more then seventy years later in Libya shows the same despair in the eyes of health-care staff near a destroyed hospital.  

The photo exhibition "Health Care in Danger: An issue for our times" is composed of 47 pairs of rare photographs, each telling similar stories although coming from very different places and times in history.  

From the Serbo-Turkish war to contemporary Syria, the images show that violence against health care is not a recent phenomenon and has never been confined to one place or one period. Even 150 years ago, and in various parts of the world, ambulances were attacked or denied free passage, medical personnel targeted, and pharmacies looted; and because of this, far too often, people who needed medical attention died.

But in recent years the nature of armed conflict has changed, and one consequence of this is that the scope of violence has widened. Most of the victims of the traditional warfare of the past were military personnel: soldiers and medical staff. Today however, increasingly civilians and civilian medical services are becoming victims.

During periods of armed violence, providing health care can become an extraordinarily hazardous undertaking beset by difficulties and threats to safety. Medical teams find themselves operating without basic equipment, and sometimes without even electricity or water. To evacuate or to reach the wounded and the sick in conflict zones, health-care workers sometimes have to put themselves at great risk.

For more information about the exhibition and the Health Care in Danger campaign, please contact:

Olga Miltcheva

Communication campaign coordinator

E-mail: Olga Miltcheva