Vickey Patel, PT, MS, is a physical therapist who recently joined our SAMS medical mission to Jordan in July. Together, she and Lydia Palmer, an occupational therapist, supported 70 patients in need of rehabilitation and therapeutic care. She shared with us her motivation for joining a SAMS medical mission, and the story of...
Dr. Nour is a Syrian pediatrician working with the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS). For four years, she has been practicing within conflict zones inside Syria. She recently spoke at a UN OHCHR/WHO Meeting on Child Mortality in Geneva. She shared with us her remarks from the meeting, detailing attacks...
Cardiologist Dr. Waseem Akhter joined the SAMS Medical Mission to Jordan in July of 2017. Throughout the medical mission, he and his colleagues performed 63 cardiac catheterizations. On the first day of the medical mission, he met a patient whose experience he shared with us. I am called to the...
Daily life in displacement wears on the body in many ways. Al-Zaatari camp is located on a 5 km stretch of land in the desert, just 13km from the Syrian border. For children in Al-Zaatari camp, the pervasive dust and dirt can lead to ocular conditions like irritation and allergic conjunctivitis,...
Dr. Salim Saiyed has travelled extensively with SAMS on various medical missions as a Family Medicine doctor. But the conditions he saw in Lebanon were by far the most dire he has encountered on a mission trip. “On the first day, we turned a refugee tent made of cardboard and...
“When I was younger I used to hear about doctors, ophthalmologists, you name it – they said they would go to Syria and help every three weeks in the summer. I thought that was a really awesome idea. I wanted to do this even before the conflict.” Even as a child,...
Hundreds wait outside my clinic. I call it a “clinic” but it could be anything from a disused storage shed to a makeshift school classroom for refugees. The patients know we only have a few minutes to talk about their symptoms before they disappear into a sea of tents or urban...
“Working with SAMS made me feel part of a brilliant community of great minds and spirits, committed to care for communities of refugees, not just through health but also through advocacy,” SAMS Global Response volunteer Dr. Kate Markham said of her work with SGR in Greece. Dr. Markham volunteered with our Global...
Six years after the eruption of the conflict in Syria, Jordan’s Al-Zaatari Refugee Camp has become the largest Syrian camp in the region, with 80,000 residents. Over half of the camp’s population is under 24 years old, with 19.9% of the population being under five years old. Through our medical...
“If we were to create something called ‘human devastation syndrome’ that is what we’re seeing,” with these words, Dr. MK Hamza, Chair of SAMS Mental Health Committee, kicked off his discussion of mental health in Syria, at the SAMS’s 6th Annual National Conference in Los Angeles, CA on February 18th,...
May 3, 2017 The extent and intensity of violence against health workers globally remained alarmingly high in 2016, the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition said in a new report today. The report also finds that accountability for committing these attacks remains inadequate or non-existent. The report, entitled Impunity Must End,...
Stopped eight times by the army as well as various uniformed officials for scheduled security checks at Beirut airport alone, one can sense the tense atmosphere in this country. 25% of Lebanon’s population is now Syrian refugees. It’s a country surrounded by decades of conflict with Palestine in the south...
