Nursing in Conflict & Chaos

A Chechen boy soldier stands in the street during the battle for Grozny. In 1995. Photographer: Mikhail Evstafiev, used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Photo accessed from Wikimedia Commons.

Across time, wherever the need, nurses have sought to bring comfort & support for the suffering from disaster, war & violence. Florence Nightingale is a famous example. In keeping with this legacy, NIGH seeks to bring stories of the challenges nurses & caregivers still face in this arena today.

The horrific cost of armed conflict for individuals, families, communities and nation states cannot be underestimated. According to some estimates, over 90 per cent of the victims of armed conflict are civilians. The catastrophic sophistication of modern weaponry has rendered our global village a potentially very dangerous place. We are all potential victims, regardless where the conflict begins.

The physical costs are easiest to see: the loss of life, limbs, and other horrible, disfiguring injuries. Less visible, but no less damaging, are other kinds of loss, children abruptly orphaned, mothers frantically searching for missing infants, entire villages simply disappearing from the map. And how do we begin to assess the loss experienced by adolescents who know how to use an assault weapon – and kill - even before they fully realize the meaning of life?