2025 Volume 12 Issue 1 Pages 102
Introduction and Objectives: Over the past five years, the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict between Gaza and Israel have had a significant impact on the medical cooperation project with Palestine Red Crescent Society (hereinafter “PRCS”) in Lebanon. Lessons learned from the project will be reported.
Approaches and results: The Japanese Red Cross Society launched the project for five hospitals of the PRCS in 2018. The project had to be suspended twice due to the two events listed above. On-site team and technical support team worked for this project. Activities were conducted to improve the quality of nursing care. The first hospital’s activity period of one year was due to the fact that the actual activity period was shortened by preparations for the start of the activity; the other hospitals’ activity period was six months as planned. The third hospital could only operate for three months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The second phase resumed in April 2022. However, in October 2023, the conflict between Gaza and Israel affected the security in Lebanon, a hospital where the team had newly started its activities had to discontinue its activities immediately after the baseline survey was completed.
Discussion: Deterioration of security due to COVID-19 and conflicts was unpredictable and directly resulted in project interruptions. Furthermore, the short duration of the project activities in each hospital made it difficult to delegate and continue the project to local staff. And the short duration of activities in one hospital increases the risk of withdrawal before the activities are in place. When implementing cooperation projects, including nursing skills transfer, under unpredictable circumstances, it is important to set a time frame of one year for each hospital, and to hire and train nursing staff as local staff to enable them to take over the activities.
