As extreme climate events and violent conflicts increase across the globe, destroying healthcare systems and sparking more severe disease outbreaks and hunger crises, children and their families need access to humanitarian healthcare more than ever.
Save the Children’s Emergency Health Unit has the right people, in the right places, ready to save lives. We have teams of experts with decades of experience delivering healthcare in some of the toughest and hardest-to-reach places.
In the past eight years, the Emergency Health Unit has provided healthcare for children and adults caught up in some of the most complex and diverse humanitarian crises such as the conflicts in Sudan, Syria and Northern Ethiopia, cyclones in Mozambique and Malawi, the Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the global COVID-19 pandemic and the hunger crises in Kenya and Afghanistan.
The Emergency Health Unit responds to disasters that wipe out entire communities, as well as forgotten crises where children’s suffering can go unnoticed.
Its services include:
Primary healthcare Basic reproductive health services, mental health support and treatment for common diseases and malnutrition. This service is delivered through mobile or self-sufficient clinics.
Disease outbreaksContaining disease outbreaks – such as cholera, malaria and measles – through treatment and prevention.
Vaccination campaigns Mass vaccination campaigns to immunise children against the most common life-threatening diseases. Can provide vaccinations for more than 165,000 children and adults per week.
Maternal and child inpatient careCan deploy a team of medical experts with medicine and specialised equipment who can support in an existing medical facility to provide newborns, children, mothers and pregnant women with lifesaving care. If needed, the team can also set up a 24/7 standalone 25-bed hospital.
Specialised response Tailored to the specific needs of a Save the Children country office, crises or context. For example, supporting a wider Save the Children team to set up a nutrition stabilisation centre to treat children with severe acute malnutrition.
With a proven track record of saving and protecting the lives of millions of children and adults since 2015, the Emergency Health Unit is best placed to meet the growing need for emergency healthcare, but it urgently needs your support to grow, adapt and improve its services to reach at least 1 million children and adults with life-saving healthcare by 2025.
We ask for your help to enable us to rapidly deploy our expert health teams whenever, and wherever they are most needed to save children’s lives.
Together with our Emergency Health Unit, you can help deliver the high-quality public healthcare that children and their families need to survive.
