The 20/20 Health Systems Project just launched with a new web-accessible database of health systems statistics:
The Health Systems Database draws data from publicly available and internationally comparable databases. Sources are publications from the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). More recent data may be available from other sources including in-country sources. The user contribution section of this tool is designed to capture and share such information.
Hat tip to the Global Health Policy blog.
Full list of variables in the datasets after the break.
At approximately 10:00am on May 3rd, the United States fired three precision-guided weapons at a small building next to Sadr General Hospital in the Sadr City slum of Baghdad. The building is alleged by coalition forces to be a “criminal element command and control center“. The first munition struck the small building, the second struck the hospital’s ambulance parking lot and broke the hospital’s water line, and the third hit a generator used by the neighborhood but not the hospital.
McClatchy’s Leila Fadel and Shashank Bengali described the damage:
Sadr Hospital, one of two main hospitals serving the massive Shiite Muslim slum, is operating on a backup water supply that wasn’t expected to last longer than 48 hours. On Sunday afternoon, a main street outside the hospital was flooded as workmen tried to repair a series of underground pipes that ruptured when the missiles targeted what U.S. military officials described as a militia outpost a few yards from the hospital.
“If there are no more attacks, we might be able to fix it. We don’t know,” said a hospital security official who gave his name as Abu Sajjad. “Otherwise, in two days we will run out of water and the hospital can’t go on.”
The official said that the U.S. strike also damaged 15 ambulances and forced many hospital staff to flee. Not everyone returned to work Sunday, leaving a Spartan emergency ward nearly empty of doctors.
The airstrike betrays an understandable ignorance in coalition forces towards the nature of health care delivery. While coalition forces avoid targeting hospitals directly, this does not protect the ability of the hospital to function. The rational for not striking hospitals is to keep them operating and providing health to the local population. However, any hospital’s functions are reliant on a large network of facilities and services. This network includes ambulance facilities and water lines. Most of these network nodes exist outside the hospital’s physical perimeter and whose presence is not calculated into airstrike planning. If policy makers truly want to maintain access to healthcare during armed conflict they must consider not only the hospital’s physical facilities but also key nodes in the area’s health care network, regardless of whether or not they fly the red cross.