NEWS FROM
LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF
August 8, 2002
For more information contact Jonathan Frerichs at (410) 230-2802.
In this news release:
- LWR Helps Provide Medical Care to Palestinians in Occupied Territories
LWR Helps Provide Medical Care to Palestinians in Occupied Territories
Baltimore, August 8, 2002 – Lutheran World Relief is helping to provide medical care and trauma counseling for people affected by the violence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
More and more Palestinians who cannot reach hospitals in Palestinian cities are coming to Augusta Victoria Hospital (AVH), LWR’s partner in East Jerusalem. They come from areas outside the main Palestinian cities. For many Palestinians, for whom this can be a major life and death situation, it is generally easier and safer for them to go to AVH than to try to get to a hospital that is closer to their homes, but is in an area that is under curfew. AVH treated more patients last month (July, 2002) than it had treated in any month in the last five years.
The process is complicated by the region’s security realities. The AVH staff prepares the paperwork patients must have to get through checkpoints and transports patients to the hospital from the West Bank in cooperation with the Red Crescent and other ambulance services.
Most AVH patients are Palestinian Refugees from the West Bank who find their way to the hospital for much-needed medical services. Many of the Palestinian patients need dialysis, which they receive at AVH along with a safe place to stay.
But, because not everyone who needs care can get to Augusta Victoria Hospital, the hospital continues to send doctors and nurses to clinics in the West Bank refugee camps (unless security forces close off the area completely). Ecumenical Accompaniment helps the doctors and nurses get to the villages, a critical factor since most of the villages have no access to primary medical care.
AVH’s village home visit program provides care, medicine, and follow-up for the terminally ill, the handicapped and women who have recently had babies. The medical staff identifies high-risk psychological patients and also is beginning a stress reduction program, and it continues first aid and other health education programs in the villages.
LWR partner AVH, through coordination by Action by Churches Together (ACT), is an effective provider of emergency services in difficult and dangerous times. Although many patients aren’t able to pay, AVH serves all patients who come for care either at the hospital in East Jerusalem or to the hospital’s medical staff in clinics throughout the occupied territories.
The health outreach programs of Augusta Victoria Hospital are in great need of financial support. Please give generously to Lutheran World Relief so that this life-giving work will continue.
Lutheran World Relief urges all people to pray for the staff of its partner, Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, and for all people affected by the continuing tensions in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
