The World's Emergency Room

The Growing Threat to Doctors, Nurses, and Humanitarian Workers

By: Michael VanRooyen

Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray

Twenty years ago the most common cause of death for medical humanitarians and other aid workers was traffic accidents; today it is violent attacks. And the death of each doctor, nurse, paramedic, midwife, and vaccinator is multiplied untold times in the vulnerable populations deprived of their care. In a 2005 report, the ICRC found that for every soldier killed in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than 60 civilians died due to loss of immunizations and other basic health services.

The World's Emergency Room: The Growing Threat to Doctors, Nurses, and Humanitarian Workers documents this dangerous trend, demonstrates the urgent need to reverse it, and explores how that can be accomplished. Drawing on VanRooyen's personal experiences and those of his colleagues in international humanitarian medicine, he takes listeners into clinics, wards, and field hospitals around the world where medical personnel work with inadequate resources under dangerous conditions to care for civilians imperiled by conflict. VanRooyen undergirds these compelling stories with data and historical context, emphasizing how they imperil the key doctrine of medical neutrality, and what to do about it.

©2016 Michael VanRooyen (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

A Must Read for the Modern Humanitarian

This was a fabulous overview of humanitarian crises and action in the last 30 years.

False advertising

I got this book as I was expecting it to be about - well, the growing threat to humanitarian workers - which is what the title indicates. But it is not, apart from the odd sentence here and there. This is mainly a book where Mr VanRooyen writes how he established academic courses and projects into humanitarian aid (albeit without much explanation of what difference the courses have made or how they are taught). I will be returning this book.