Stories & News

The MSF Academy in South Sudan provides comprehensive healthcare training for local healthcare workers, enabling them to deliver quality nursing, midwifery, and outpatient care to those in need in their communities.

In 2002, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams opened the first outpatient treatment centre offering free care to people living with HIV in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Twenty years later, while great progress has been achieved in the country, major gaps remain in testing and treatment, causing thousands of preventable deaths each year. 

When 14-year-old Peter* started having epileptic seizures, a misdiagnosis only made things worse, and his mother feared he wouldn’t be able to return to school. Now on regular treatment, Peter looks forwarding to fulfilling his own dreams for the future, and his mother’s for him. 

When Mary*, a 15-year-old school student in Monrovia, Liberia, started having epileptic seizures last year, it was frightening and confusing for her and everyone around her. The Médecins Sans Frontières-supported epilepsy treatment program at Star of the Sea Health Centre has helped her family and community understand the condition so that Mary can draw on their support to stay in school. 

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF / Doctors Without Borders) has scaled-up its emergency response amid a surging second wave of COVID-19 in Mumbai in Maharashtra state. India recently broke a global record when it recorded more than 300,000 new infections in a single day, with a whopping 115,736 new cases reported in Maharashtra state on a single day on 16 April.

As the global coronavirus pandemic reshapes lives around the world, the health needs of children in low income settings continue to overwhelm already stretched health systems. The impact of COVID-19 on children is twofold: the direct effects of the disease itself, and the indirect consequences. 

Tankred Stöbe, MSF emergency coordinator, visited several countries in South-East Asia to assess their preparedness for potential outbreaks of COVID-19 and the support MSF could provide at this stage. He participated in training sessions with healthcare staff in a hepatitis C clinic in Phnom Penh A similar training was held in a hospital in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, where MSF treats patients with tuberculosis. The training sessions helped to improve knowledge and reduce fear among the staff, two prerequisites for providing the best level of care to our patients.