Surgical care for refugees at the Red Cross Red Crescent Emergency Field Hospital in Bangladesh

Abstract

Since 25 August 2017, about 700,000 Muslim refugees from Rakhine State in Myanmar have flooded into Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh fleeing a violent crackdown by the Myanmar military, which has been described as ethnic cleansing. Due to the vastly increasing population and deteriorating conditions in the refugee camps, the Bangladeshi government, various UN agencies, and several nongovernmental organizations have been providing emergency humanitarian support. On 16 October 2017, the International Federation of Red Cross and Crescent Societies established the Emergency Field Hospital in collaboration with the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society. The hospital was built in the Rubber Garden, which is one of the largest camps in the Kutupalong Expansion Site, a so-called ‘Mega Camp.’ The hospital has 3 wards with 50 beds in total, an operating theatre and a maternity unit, all housed in cloth tents. I worked there as a surgeon on June 2018, during the hot and humid monsoon season. We managed 110 surgical cases in 3 weeks, including many cases of abscess on the trunk, trauma due to assault, and road traffic accidents. This report describes our surgical experience in the Emergency Field Hospital and highlights differences from our experience following the 2005 Kashmir Earthquake in northern Pakistan.