Anabah Medical-Surgical Centre

It was a former barracks: we converted it to a hospital for the victims of war.

When we arrived in Anabah in 1999, our first project in Afghanistan, we opened a Surgical Centre to offer free treatment to victims of war and anti-personnel mines. They had been scattered during the Russian offensive, but twenty years later they continued to create victims, with no health facility in the valley that could treat them.

An hospital for the Panjshir Valley

Over the years, the Surgical Center has become a proper general hospital: emergency surgery, general surgery, traumatology, internal medicine and paediatrics have been added to war surgery. In 2015 alone, our doctors and nurses attended over 39,000 patients.

Today, our hospital in the Panshir Valley is a point of reference for the population of a very large area, inhabited by about 250,000 people.

Since 2003, the Anabah hospital also hosts the Maternity Centre, the only specialised and free of charge facility of its kind in the area.

The First Aid Posts and Health Centres network

Connected to the Centre are 18 First Aid Posts and Health Centres, located in the most isolated villages in the valley and in the provinces of Kapisa, Parwan, Badakhshan and the Pass of Salang. In these structures, national staff, supervised by international colleagues, provide basic health care and first aid to those who need it; our ambulances are ready 24 hours to transfer patients who need to be hospitalised.

A specialisation school for Afghan doctors

The EMERGENCY hospital in Anabah is now recognized by the Afghan Ministry of Health as a Training Centre for Specialisation in Gynecology, Obstetrics and Pediatrics. In 2015 alone, we had 14 specialising surgeons, pediatricians and gynecologists. This is the result – and the recognition – of the great work done in these years to provide free health care to the population of the Panjshir Valley.

For more information

Project Sheet: EMERGENCY Medical-Surgical Centre in Anabah, Afghanistan