This week I attended a briefing from Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) on their work around the world and came away humbled.

Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) is an independent, international medical humanitarian organisation that provides emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural disasters and exclusion from healthcare.  

It’s not just doctors, with many other medical and operational staff working for the organisation, all of whom account for over 50,000 full time staff in 37 countries.

Of the 120 Australians currently working in the field for MSF, two addressed the briefing. One is a community psychologist who has just returned from a year in Bangladesh at the world’s biggest refugee camp Cox’s Bazaar, and the other a project director who has worked in many crisis situations such as Afghanistan and South Sudan organising sanitation, roads and facilities for the medical staff.  

The information they covered in the briefing provided a window into the scale and reach of their work and the difference they make in so many people’s lives. In South Sudan alone MSF operate one of the largest assistance programs worldwide and ran 12 regular and five emergency projects delivering a range of services. MSF teams responded to numerous disease outbreaks including measles, yellow fever, Hepatitis E and Cholera. There were numerous surges in malaria cases and an unusually high number of admissions of children suffering malnutrition.

In one example, Dr Ahmed Mahmoud Al Salem observed the dramatic deterioration of the mental health of Palestinians after 7 October 2023.  “This is not a normal trauma; this is a huge tormenting catastrophe,” he said. 

My husband and I have been donors to MSF for over ten years. If you’re thinking of supporting a charity, I urge you put MSF top of your list.