Around 1 in 6 of the world’s children live in a conflict zone, and of these 357 million children, 165 million are affected by high intensity conflicts. Pediatric war injuries pose a huge challenge to health professionals treating such patients. The evidence base on the quality and scale of this challenge is scarce, and the majority of clinicians treating these patients are either not sufficiently experienced in the treatment of war injuries, are not pediatric surgeons, or both. The majority of the evidence in the literature comes from a small subset of children who were managed in well-resourced military facilities that differ drastically from the conditions in which the majority of war wounded children are treated.
This book – the first of its kind – is a comprehensive and state-of-the art guide for both local and humanitarian non-pediatric specialists who are often forced to operate on and treat children with war injuries with little or no previous experience or training. It provides healthcare workers in conflict settings with knowledge and practical advice on the entire continuum of care, from point of injury, to treatment and reconstruction, to rehabilitation and mental health support. It is comprised of concise yet comprehensive overviews of the current status of the pediatric war casualty patient treatment and will help guide patient management based on evidence from the literature, clinical and surgical experience and ongoing research and will stimulate investigative efforts in this dynamic and active field of war medicine.
The book draws on the knowledge and long experience of clinicians at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, one of the largest tertiary care and referral centers in the Middle East, which has been the foremost civilian academic hospital treating war injuries, both adult and pediatric, initially from the Lebanese war and then the Iraqi and Syrian wars.