Afghanistan: How do you respond to a 'mass casualty incident'?

For the past weeks, the world’s media has been focused on the crisis in the Middle East.

The sharp escalation in violence has brought fear to the lives of millions of people. Airstrikes have hit densely populated areas with particular ferocity in Iran and in Lebanon, where hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes.

Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) teams across the region have been adapting their programmes to respond to the crisis.

However, behind the headlines, on the other side of the Greater Middle East Region, a long-term humanitarian crisis continues to play out in Afghanistan.

For this month’s podcast, we spoke to Dr Mohammad Qaher Poya, the deputy nursing director at MSF's specialist trauma centre in Kunduz, a city in northern Afghanistan.

The trauma centre was originally set up to meet the needs of people injured during the war in Afghanistan. Now, in this post-conflict environment, the team uses their long experience of dealing with what's known as 'mass casualty incidents' to save lives when the sheer number of patients threatens to overwhelm the hospital.

Dr Poya took a break between busy shifts to call us from Afghanistan.

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