JERUSALEM, ISRAEL — A top burn doctor and a senior anesthesiologist from the Hadassah Medical Organization flew to Macedonia just 48 hours after a fire tore through a nightclub in the northern city of Kočani on March 16, killing 59 people and injuring more than 150 others.
The Hadassah doctors were part of an 11-person medical relief mission organized by Israel’s Ministry of Health, which had requested that Stav Sarna Kahn, MD, director of Hadassah’s Burns Unit and the Scar Clinic at Hadassah’s Gandel Rehabilitation Center, be part of the group.
Over the next few days, Dr. Kahn, senior Hadassah anesthesiologist Yuval Meroz, MD, and the rest of the Israeli team alternated at three hospitals in North Macedonia, including Central Hospital, where the largest number of victims had been taken. At each location, the Israelis worked side by side with the hospital staff to assess, treat and operate on patients, often using supplies donated by Hadassah.
“[T]he sense of pride [was] enormous and the fact that all members of the delegation stopped all their activities in Israel and rushed to join in helping another country was, for all of us, [the] obvious [thing to do],” Dr. Kahn told Israel Hayom.
Before the delegation returned home, North Macedonia’s president, Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, invited the members to her residence for an official visit. She thanked them and expressed her appreciation that they had dropped everything to help her country get through the biggest crisis it had ever faced.
Rushing to Countries in Crisis
This was not the first time that teams from the Hadassah Medical Organization have rushed to help a country in crisis. In 2022, Hadassah established the only field hospitals on Ukraine’s southern border with Poland, treating 35,000 Ukrainian refugees over the course of five months. During the Covid pandemic, Hadassah infectious disease experts traveled to Argentina and Romania to advise the healthcare authorities and to Ethiopia to help a hospital serving a population of 8 million people.
Other examples of Hadassah’s acting quickly to help countries in need include having a world-renowned expert in adolescent trauma fly to Mexico in 2017 to teach doctors how to treat teenagers suffering from PTSD after a massive earthquake and sending physicians to treat the victims of equally devastating quakes in Southern Turkey, Nepal and Haiti.
About the Hadassah Medical Organization:
For more than a century, the Hadassah Medical Organization, the Jerusalem-based nonprofit hospital system founded and owned by Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, has set the standard for excellence in medical treatment and research in Israel. The experience and ingenuity of Hadassah’s doctors and scientists have led to new tools and treatments in all areas of medicine, including therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. Visit hadassah.org/how-we-help/our-hospitals.