NorPal-Sawa

Name of the activity: NorPal-Sawa

Country/NMO: Norway (NMSA)

Program: Emergency, Disaster Risk & Humanitarian Action

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Education. Education on health issues for specific societal groups, either in the form of projects (set of tasks for a certain group over a fixed period of time), events (something notable that happens) or conferences (form meeting about ideas related to a particular topic, usually over several days).

General description:

Each year, during four weeks in the summer, 10 Norwegian medical students travel to the West Bank where they together with 10 palestinian medical students conduct the project. This year, they will spend the first 3 weeks in hospitals, ambulances and rural health clinics, getting first hand experience with the health care system. In between the rotations and in the afternoons, the participants will have talks, lecture and workshops in different topics and skills, such as human rights and international humanitarian law, first aid, psychiatric first aid and the structure of the health care system. The last week will be spent conducting a first aid workshop for youth from refugee camps in Nablus. They will learn skills like basic CPR, how to stop bleedings and preventing infections in wounds.

Focus area:

Access to care in disaster/emergency contexts

Problem statement:

Through six long years of medical school we learn a lot and we’re prepared for a lot of different situations. However, when it comes to global health, there’s often a lack in both quality and quantity. Therefore, we want to give medical students the opportunity to get first hand experience with global health and with a health care system affected by conflict and occupation. Hopefully this will inspire them to keep working within this field and to create awareness when they get back home.

Target groups:

Medical students, Children, Youth, Refugees

Beneficiaries:

Medical students, Doctors, Other health professionals, Children, Youth, Migrants, Refugees

Objectives and indicators of success:

– Increase knowledge and interest for global health for Norwegian and palestinian medical students. Measured through number of participants wanting to coordinate the project the following year and number of participants taking on other relevant positions in their NMO.

– Create awareness among medical students on how conflict and occupation impacts the health care system and peoples mental and physical health. Measured through number of participants(always 10 norwegian and 10 palestinian), number of applications for the project, number of followers and views/likes on social media.

– 100 youth from refugee camps in Nablus will get skills in first aid through a first aid workshop in July 2019. Measured through actual number of participants in the workshops.

Methodology:

– The students will get first hand experience from the health care system through clinical rotations in hospitals in Nablus in the West Bank. Hopefully, this year the participants will also be able to rotate in the ambulances and in rural health clinics. They will also have lectures with different organizations and actors, such as the UNRWA, OCHA, the Ministry of Health etc. In the hospitals, together with local doctors, they will also receive and conduct workshops on different topics related to this years theme. This will be done throughout the 3 first weeks of the project.

– Each year, we select a new theme for the project, this year we will focus on emergency medicine. We will try to include topics like first aid, psychological first aid, human rights, international humanitarian law.

– The last week of the project the participants will get the opportunity to teach what they’ve learned through the first three weeks to youth from refugee camps in Nablus.

Plans for evaluation:

We evaluate the project throughout the month we stay in Nablus to make change underway to best reach our goals. After the project all 20 participants receive a evaluation form. The Norwegian participants also meet over two days in the fall to evaluate the project and suggest improvements for next year. Three to four of the participants become project coordinators for the following year, and this way we make sure there is consistency in the project.