Triage in a war hospital: the case of the Kabul emergency room

Alberto Zanin has been running the Kabul hospital of the NGO Emergency specialising in war surgery for two years. Before that, he ran the surgical centre for war victims in Lashkar-gah in southern Afghanistan for two years. In war surgery, triage is essential: after each battle, dozens of victims arrive at the hospital, and the doctors must decide quickly, following precise rules, which patients to treat and how. Alberto Zanin has explained the logic of triage in war medicine and talked about his experience in Afghanistan, and in particular about the attacks in Kabul this summer, when Emergency and the Red Cross were the only NGOs remaining in the city during the fighting.