The impact of armed conflict on paediatric healthcare consultations in Northwest Syria

Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. It may contain errors, so check it against the video before quoting.

Okay, so our project looked at analysing the paediatric trends that we saw in Northwest Syria. So for a bit of background for people who aren't really familiar with Northwest Syria or the conflict in Syria, it's been ongoing now for over 13 years and of course has led to devastating impacts on the whole population in terms of their health, but children among those are often the worst impacted. But really there's been no research looking at how they're using healthcare services and what kind of care they may be lacking or what they need. So that's where our focus was for our research.

In terms of what we did, well, we managed to work with the healthcare organisation in Syria called SAMS, or the Syrian American Medical Society, who do some really incredible work, and they gave us all of our clinical consultation data. So we analysed that over a 5-year period, and we also looked at the impacts of displacement within that area at that time as well. So with those two data sets, what we did is we matched them up against each other and saw how they're being impacted by each other. We did some fancy stats which I'm not going to go into because it's beyond me as well.

But essentially what we found was that as levels of displacement increased, so did the consultations for trauma conditions, for non-communicable diseases and for nutrition related disorders, all things which we were expecting. However, what we weren't expecting to see was a decrease in consultations for infectious diseases, which does go against all of the current evidence. So we found some really interesting things, but I think what it highlights is that really aid provision needs to be tailored to the need that we're seeing, and new research that's been conducted to figure out what that need is. And that's true not only within Syria but also other conflict settings around the world.

So that's really what we hope that the project is going to be applied for in the future, for evidence-based global health policy making. In terms of what we want to do now, we want to work, focus really heavily on multi agency collaboration, not just with other healthcare organisations but also with people in Syria who are using the services, and to see what kind of barriers they're facing and what are their motivations for seeking out care. So thank you for listening.