The Diplomat
Spain is going to activate the field hospital of the Spanish Technical Team for Emergency Relief and Response (START) in the framework of the European Civil Protection Mechanism, launched by the EU to alleviate the consequences of the earthquake that has affected Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.
The START team (also known as the “red vests”) has a field hospital in which more than 70 people will participate, including professionals from the National Health System, logisticians and staff from the Humanitarian Action Office of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), which leads and coordinates the team’s missions. This hospital has an operating room and hospitalization capacity for 20 people.
The Turkish authorities have issued an appeal for international assistance whose response is being coordinated by the EMT (Emergency Medical Teams) Initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by the European Civil Protection Mechanism, Team Europe. The Spanish offer to deploy the START Team was accepted by the Turkish authorities yesterday morning. Preparations for the deployment have already started and the team will leave for a location, yet to be defined, in the coming days.
AECID’s Humanitarian Action Office has been in contact, from the first moments of the emergency, with the Directorate General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO), the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the WHO EMT Initiative and the Spanish Embassy in Turkey to keep abreast of the needs of the population most affected by this earthquake. In addition, AECID organized yesterday a first meeting with Autonomous Communities and Spanish humanitarian NGOs to coordinate the humanitarian response to the earthquake.
In addition to the START Team, Spain will contribute to the emergency appeal launched by the IFRC (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies) and will support the emergency activations of Spanish humanitarian NGOs that have emergency agreements with AECID and are currently working in Syria. The support through these mechanisms will be defined in the coming hours, once a more detailed analysis of the needs on the ground has been carried out.
START counts among its capabilities a level two field hospital endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO) on May 31, 2018 (EMT 2) and verified by the European Commission’s European Civil Protection Mechanism in January 2019. Level two implies capability to perform surgical interventions. In addition, the START Team is part of the catalog of resources available in the European Civil Protection Mechanism of the European Commission.
Since its launch in 2018, START has carried out humanitarian missions in Mozambique (following the passage of Cyclone Idai in 2019), Bata (Equatorial Guinea, following the explosion of a powder magazine that leveled part of the city in 2021) and Haiti (following the earthquake in August 2021). The START project, whose healthcare team belongs to the public health system, has the capacity to deploy, within a maximum of 72 hours, to any corner of the world where a humanitarian emergency occurs. Spain is, together with Italy and France, one of the three EU countries to have such a team.
