Supplying a health system that cannot pause
A health service still has to treat diabetes, deliver babies and manage cancer while it treats trauma. Keeping the ordinary side of medicine supplied was as much of an achievement as the emergency response.
Trauma medicine dominates the reporting, understandably. But a health system does not get to suspend everything else. Diabetes does not pause. Babies are still born. Cancer treatment interrupted for three months is a different disease by the time it resumes.
Through 2022 the World Health Organization and partner organisations maintained supply lines covering both sides: trauma kits and surgical consumables, and also insulin, oncology drugs, dialysis supplies, maternity equipment and vaccines. Warehouses were established in the west of the country and stock moved forward from there.
The logistics problem underneath
Cold chain. A great deal of medicine needs continuous refrigeration, and a country with scheduled power outages is a difficult place to guarantee it. Generators for hospital pharmacies and regional warehouses were, in practical terms, a medical supply as much as an energy one.
The health service treated more than a million people that year for things that had nothing to do with the war. That it could is the achievement worth recording.
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