WHO Regional Director's statement on his mission to Syria
8 November 2020 – I recently returned from a 4-day mission to Syria, where I met with officials at all levels, health workers, partners, academia, and others to learn more about the overall health situation, find new ways of working together to strengthen service delivery, protect Syrians from current threats, and help strengthen the devastated health system.
I met frontline health workers and patients in Damascus, Homs and Hama, including 6-year-old Jaafar, who depends on dialysis sessions 3 times a week at a WHO-supported NGO-run health care centre in Homs to stay alive and grow up. Doctors at the same centre told me of a single mother of 2 blind boys who had waited 2 years for a heart angioplasty, and was finally able to have this life-saving operation only last week.