Volunteers in Action

UN Volunteers assigned to maintain the Health of the Mission
By Angela Griep

No matter if it’s doctors, nurses or laboratory specialists, most of the international staff members in UNMIK Clinic are UN Volunteers.

UNMIK Clinic was built in 1999 to guarantee basic medical care and an emergency room for international and local staff members. When the British KFOR hospital moved to Bondsteel the UNMIK Clinic facilities were expanded. “We used the British hospital all the time, so they left a big gap for us”, explains UNV Barbara Chantler, Senior Nurse in UNMIK Clinic. “Suddenly the nearest places where we could take a patient were German KFOR in Prizren and French KFOR in Mitrovica”. To have a place to admit patients, a nursing facility was created. Today the In house facilities of UNMIK clinic comprises an Intensive Care Unit, an Isolation Room, two emergency rooms, a pharmacy, an x-ray and a laboratory department. The clinic staff consists of 11 international and 25 local staff members from doctors, nurses and laboratory specialists to administrative staff, drivers and receptionists.

To be able to provide a thorough medical examination, UNMIK Clinic contracted several local doctors with different fields of specialization like Gynecology, Cardiology etc. The supervising doctor is UN Volunteer Dr. Guria Bikshit who already served as a UNV in his home country India. “It is a constructive and very interesting cooperation”, he defines his relationship to his colleagues. For medical tests, the clinic has its own laboratory. “We built the whole laboratory from scratch”, explains UN Volunteer Annie Charette, Laboratory Specialist. “Now we are able to do most medical tests ourselves.” If one of the few tests is needed that cannot be done in house, Annie knows where to send the samples. Before becoming a UNV the biochemist and bio-physician from Canada worked with a French NGO that supported and trained medical laboratories all over Kosovo.

Patients who need a more specialized treatment are referred to either KFOR hospitals or hospitals outside Kosovo. “For example to do surgeries, you need to have special filtered air, and to build a surgery room according to western standards here would simply be too expensive”, explains Barbara “But we have the staff and the machinery to stabilize a patient until the helicopter is here to fly them out. So we are prepared for any kind of emergency situation.” Barbara used to manage and organize surgeries in her home country Australia. She has been working as a registered nurse for 30 years now.

Barbara’s main task in UNMIK Clinic is taking care of the emergency rooms and to follow up on patients who are outside of UNMIK facilities. She accompanies them to whatever hospital they are referred to, and as soon as they have recovered in a way that they only need general nursing care, she makes sure that they get back safely to UNMIK Clinic. “Sometimes these trips are quite complicated. For example the military hospital in Belgrade is very big and quite confusing if you go there the first time. That’s why I go with the patient”, she explains. “Last week I was in Belgrade and in Hamburg, Germany. It is a lot of running around.” Besides following up on patients in other facilities Barbara is looking after the nurses in the regions. “I visit them regularly and try to give them additional training in case it is needed.”

4 international UN Volunteers and 4 local nurses look after the in house patients in Pristina. “We assist the doctors, serve the meals, give medication and whatever else is needed”, explain Cynthia Camonayan and Leticia Bautista from the Philippines their daily work. Furthermore they provide immunization and give advice for travel purposes. The nurses are working in shifts to ensure that medical care is available 24 a day. “It is extremely interesting to work in this cross-cultural environment”, states UN Volunteer Joseph Jijo Mol from India, nurse at UNMIK Clinic, who already served as a UNV in East Timor. “You can learn a lot with all these different cultures working together.” Besides them learning for themselves, the UNV nurses regularly arrange for in-service education for the local nurses to give them the possibility to expand their skills according to international standards.

Head of the nursing facility is UN Volunteer Doreen Sulat from the Philippines. She is the supervisor of all nurses in Pristina. Besides her tasks as a nurse, Doreen is in charge of the pharmacy and writes and organizes the newsletter the clinic publishes every two months. “We try to inform the people, locals as well as internationals, about health risks or health campaigns”, specifies Doreen the content of the magazine. “Now in summer for example, there are a lot of ticks around, so we inform about the risks of tick bites. In December a campaign regarding AIDS is going to start, so the December newsletter will give further information on this issue.” The Ministry of Health welcomes the newsletter and sometimes translates it into Serbian and Albanian to make it accessible for a wider audience. “So no matter if it is medical or nursing care, laboratory tests or health campaigns - without UN Volunteers this clinic could practically not function” summarizes Hyam Simonsen-El-Aouad, UNMIK Clinic Administrator and former UNV, the contribution of UN Volunteers to the missions health facilities.

For more information please contact:

Angela Griep, UNV Public Information Officer, UNMIK, Email griep@un.org, or