Public healthcare on the brink

“I don’t know how no public hospitals have shut down until now. I am very surprised they are all still open.” So says Walid Ammar, director general of Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) for the past two decades. He argues that the scale of the Syrian refugee influx in the past two years — at nearly a million registered (roughly 25 percent of the Lebanese population) — has stretched the sector to the point of collapse. While Ammar could perhaps be prone to overstating the scale of the problem when talking to the media, health sector and economic experts agree that the crisis in many parts of the healthcare system is acute. In a study conducted last year, the World Bank concluded that “the increase in demand for health services caused by the Syrian conflict is straining Lebanon’s health system.” In total, the report said, the additional financial burden