Humanitarian Research Lab joins international coalition protecting health care workers

The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) has joined an international coalition dedicated to protecting health workers, services, and infrastructure in conflict areas around the world.

The Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition (SHCC) is comprised of more than 40 prominent humanitarian organizations including Human Rights Watch, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the American College of Physicians, the World Medical Association, and humanitarian and human rights centers affiliated with Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Drexel universities as well as the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

Members of the SHCC work together to collect data on attacks against health workers worldwide in an effort to hold the perpetrators of those attacks accountable. The Yale HRL is a member of the SHCC’s Steering Committee, which develops an annual report of the compiled data.

The Yale HRL’s acceptance into the SHCC was spearheaded by Dr. Danielle Poole, ScD, MPH, the HRL’s director of research. Dr. Poole said the coalition’s work is critically important given the multiple conflicts and humanitarian crises currently happening around the globe.

“At a time when the need for accurate, timely reporting of attacks on health care has never been higher, organizations like the coalition have the scientific expertise and the resources to really make a difference,” Dr. Poole said. “If you have data on attacks on health facilities, it can be used as a deterrent and maybe perpetrators will think twice before hitting another facility.”

Dr. Poole said the Yale HRL’s expertise in gathering detailed information from satellite imagery and various open source platforms such as social media accounts will help the coalition document attacks on health care facilities in areas where on-the-ground observations are difficult.

Dr. Poole has extensive experience in this area. In December 2024, she helped lead an HRL team that collaborated with the Sudanese American Physicians Association in presenting a report that documented widespread damage to health care facilities in Sudan’s Khartoum State during the country’s ongoing civil war. In January 2025, Dr. Poole served as lead author of a study that documented damage to medical facilities in Mariupol, Ukraine during the ongoing war with Russia. That study, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Global Public Health, found that 77% of Ukrainian medical facilities had been damaged during a three-month period in 2022, despite the fact that medical facilities are considered civilian objects specially protected by international humanitarian law.

Those incidents represent just a small fraction of the worldwide incidents impacting health care workers and facilities. In its 2023 annual report, the SHCC documented 2,562 incidents of violence against health care systems across 30 countries, which was over 500 more incidents than in 2022 – a 25% increase.

Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood, PhD, MPH, faculty director of the Yale HRL, said the HRL team is looking forward to being a valuable contributing partner within the coalition.

“By combining HRL’s analytical expertise with SHCC’s advocacy and policy work, we hope to contribute to a more robust global response to attacks on health care and ensure that perpetrators are held accountable,” said Dr. Khoshnood. “We want to ensure that violations against health care in conflict zones do not go unnoticed and that meaningful responses are put in place.”

Individuals interested in learning more about international efforts to project health workers in conflict areas may wish to attend the Yale School of Public Health’s Leaders in Public Health Speaker Series on Feb. 5. On that date, YSPH Dean Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH, will be speaking with Dr. J. Stephen Morrison, PhD, Yale ’77, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC. as the featured guest.

Dr. Morrison is author and producer of the award-winning documentary ‘The New Barbarianism,’ which examines the surge in violence directed toward health sector workers and facilities in Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan.

Dr. Morrison currently leads the CSIS Bipartisan Alliance for Global Health Security, which shapes discourse in Congress on pandemic preparedness, HIV/AIDS, immunization, climate and health, engagement with China, and provision of health amid wars. He also leads global health security forums at the annual Munich Security Conference, and has generated over 20 one-hour episodes of the broadcast program, ‘Gaza: The Human Toll.’

The Leaders in Public Health Speaker Series with Dr. Morrison takes place from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. ET in Winslow Auditorium in the Laboratory of Epidemiology and Public Health (LEPH) building at 60 College St., New Haven. The event is co-sponsored by the Yale Institute for Global Health.