Social Health Care for Healing Syrian Refugees

The Challenges:

Over these now several months of the COVID-19 pandemic the most vulnerable and struggling communities in the world are experiencing the greatest life-threatening impact.

The massive population of refugees we continue to help in Jordan make up one of the most vulnerable, high risk groups among these communities for contracting, dying from, and rapidly spreading the COVID-19 virus. Combined with the devastating trauma and loss already experienced due to the Syrian civil war, these refugees are now faced with even greater risk to their survival.

• Like many countries, the entire society in Jordan is under a strict mandate to physical distance and avoid travel.
• The more than 1 million Syrian refugees in Jordan in particular are crowded into tightly packed living conditions with no ability to physical distance.
• A huge portion of the refugee population already suffers from profoundly compromised immune systems, fragile medical conditions, low resistance to infection, and general poor health.
• At the same time, the already significantly overstretched health care system in Jordan is struggling to meet even the minimum needs of it’s own citizens, and refugees are unfortunately at a lower priority even for these increasingly limited services.
• Both international and local humanitarian services for refugees in Jordan are also now greatly hindered,curtailed, or simply suspended due to the pandemic restrictions.
• As a result access by refugees to any health care services, supplies, or self-help information on COVID-19 monitoring, treatment, and mitigation is severely limited, and in many cases nonexistent.

What this now leads to is the danger that this entire population is on the verge of an eruption of COVID-19 cases, death, and transmission to many more, both within the refugee community and the surrounding region. As such, this threatens to produce a humanitarian catastrophe of even higher proportions than we are witnessing today.

What We Are Doing With The Help Of Donors To Meet This New Level Of Challenge:

In the midst of this pandemic among the most at-risk community in Jordan, and in addition to our on-going psychosocial trauma healing services, health and safety knowledge - and particularly specialized medical assessment, guidance, and instruction personally tailored to individual and family conditions and symptoms - is currently the most powerful asset we have at our disposal. The task has been getting this assistance to those in most need in time for them to benefit from it and help slow the virus.

An effective way we are using to achieve this is through relying more on tele-health. For several years we have already been providing a portion of our assistance as tele-health services in addition to our on-site, face to face assistance. To meet the increased challenges of the pandemic we are now working to rapidly and significantly ramp up our existing tele-health ability by setting up an expanding network of live virtual stations throughout Jordan in apartment buildings, large group homes, and camps where large numbers of refugees are already forced to live in compressed quarters, and where critical life-saving tele-health services can still immediately and regularly reach them.

The services are staffed by our international team of expert health care professionals, our local treatment team, and our large pool of hundreds of local trainees who are medical students and professionals. This is a coordinated virtual treatment, health education, guidance, and psychosocial support system in regions of Jordan with the highest concentration of refugees.

We are currently concentrating on sites in Amman and Irbid, and hope to continue adding sites in these and other regions of Jordan. Each virtual station allows a large number of people to access health care and support. With the critical financial support of generous donors we are purchasing and putting the required computer and internet technology and basic medical self-monitoring equipment in place that is needed to establish as many of these live virtual stations in as many of these compacted population centers as possible to maintain contact, provide health care service, and ensure life-saving help continues to reach refugee children and their families in desperate need.

Links:

• Details at our nonprofit partner's site: Common Bond Inst.
• IHPA Contact Email for inquiries: SOlweean@aol.com