The Diplomat
The Spanish Emergency Medical Team, the START (Spanish Technical Aid Response Team), renewed last Thursday almost all the staff of the Spanish Cooperation field hospital, installed in Iskenderun since Monday, February 13, to provide hospital care to the population affected by the earthquakes in Turkey.
According to the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), 77 of the 82 people who made up the first shift returned to Spain in the early hours of Thursday morning after 14 days of work at the START field hospital, located on the outskirts of the city of Iskenderun.
The relief team, which is already in Turkey, is made up of 64 professionals -36 women and 28 men. Of these, 51 are healthcare workers from the Spanish public health system. Ten are logisticians, including firefighters from Madrid and Summa 112; there are also two professionals for psychosocial support from the NGO Doctors of the World and three cooks from the NGO Cesal. The new staff is expected to remain in Turkey for another two weeks in charge of the hospital. The team is led by AECID’s Humanitarian Action Office and four experts in logistics, water and sanitation and health who coordinate the different areas of humanitarian action deployed.
The START team, also known as “the red vests” because of their clothing, arrived in the Turkish city of Adana last Friday, February 10. From Adana, they moved to Arsuz Expo, on the outskirts of the city of Iskenderun, where team members set up the hospital in 48 hours at the site indicated by the Turkish Ministry of Health and in coordination with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Emergency Medical Teams Initiative, of which the START team is a member.
The field hospital is located in a strategic area for the reception of patients, surrounded by camps with displaced people and where the roads leading to the districts of Iskenderun, Arsuz and Belem, the most affected in the Turkish province of Hatay, converge.
Since the hospital opened on Monday, February 13, the team has treated more than 2,500 people, a figure that exceeds the planned ceiling of average number of people per day treated, estimated at 200 patients per day, for which the START team set up longer shifts. It also exceeded the increase in patients – some 150 more than usual – on February 20, when two earthquakes again shook the country.
START will continue to provide health care in Iskenderun to the populations affected by the destruction of their referral hospitals, in coordination with the Turkish health authorities and the World Health Organization’s Emergency Medical Teams (EMT) Initiative, which is managing the health response to the emergency. AECID’s expert team in humanitarian action, which is leading the START project, remains on the ground.
