The 'Front Lines' of Healthcare

Rania Kassab Sweis is a medical anthropologist who has studied healthcare workers and medical aid in the midst of warfare and crisis. Much of Sweis's fieldwork has taken place in the Middle East and North Africa Region. She can share what healthcare workers facing COVID-19 might learn from healthcare workers on the front lines of war.

"The realities around COVID-19 in the United States - particularly the recent erection of field hospitals in parks, the frantic rationing of medical supplies, the need to improvise medicine on-the-spot, and the use of Tele-health to deliver care from afar, sound eerily familar to someone who has studied Syrian doctors on the frontlines of civil war."

"The trauma, fear, and frustration American healthcare workers are currently experiencing resemble the emotional burdens many Syrian doctors have carried for years now."

Contact urnews2use@richmond.edu to connect with Sweis.