Mosul is still recovering from the battle to retake the town from IS group in 2017. With the destruction of medical facilities, especially in West Mosul, the healthcare system remains fragile with thousands of families struggling to access quality affordable health care,including paediatrics, emergency, maternal and specialized secondary healthcare. MSF opened in 2017 a specialised maternity unit in Nablus Hospital, west Mosul, to provide emergency, maternal and neonatal care to women and their babies, and a second MSF team opened a smaller facility in 2019 at Al Rafadain Primary Health Care Centre, providing routine obstetric and newborn care.
With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, number of people infected with COVID-19 in Iraq has increased quickly during the past weeks, going from from 10,000 in June to 120,000 in late July. Though the most affected governorate in Iraq remains Baghdad, the number of COVID-19 cases in Mosul is now twenty times higher than at the beginning of the pandemic. Thisis putting even more pressure on an already weak health system. While the lockdown limits people’s ability to seek healthcare, fear and stigma surrounding the disease prevent people from coming to health facilities on time, and less urgent healthcare issues are sometimes being overlooked.

The healthcare system in the city had to be reorganized to respond to the pandemic. The only general hospital in east Mosul (Al Salam) shifted its activities temporarily to receive COVID-19 patients, and Al Shifaa hospital (a hospital built and donated by MSF to the Directorate of Health in 2019) is used as the main referral point for COVID-19 patients in the Ninawa province. MSF is supporting Al Shifaa and has temporary reallocated the 62 beds in its centre for post-operative care for the testing, isolation and treatment of mild and moderate COVID-19 cases. It has since then received more than 700 patients. Though some of its activities (post-operative care surgeries, mental health services in certain primary healthcare centres) have had to be put on hold because of COVID-19 and to support the health system during the pandemic, MSF is trying to maintain, as much as possible, its regular activities in Mosul. Its maternity services, for instance, have never stopped and are still very much needed. Pregnant women remain particularly vulnerable and MSF adapted most of our services to continue to provide safe, high quality and free maternal and neonatal care to women and their babies. The number of patients in the ER room hasn’t decreased and people still come in with urgent health needs.