Let's talk COVID-19: Emergency physicians on the front lines

Join us for this live online discussion series to find out how Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is responding to the evolving COVID-19 emergency.

During the event, MSF aid workers and medical experts will answer your questions about the humanitarian impacts of COVID-19.

On Thursday, April 16, MSF-USA Executive Director Avril Benoît welcomes MSF aid workers and emergency physicians Dr. Javid Abdelmoneim and Dr. Craig Spencer. Both are currently working independently from MSF, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in hospitals in their home cities of London and New York.

Together they will share previous MSF experiences including responding to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, providing care for displaced people in places like South Sudan and Lebanon, working in conflict settings such as Raqqa, Syria, and their shared experience on board The Aquarius, MSF’s medical search and rescue ship on the Mediterranean Sea. 

After you register, you'll receive an email confirmation with the Zoom link to attend online. You'll also receive email reminders before the event.
 

Featuring:

Avril Benoît, MSF-USA executive director, has worked with the international medical humanitarian organization since 2006 in various operational management and executive leadership roles, most recently as the director of communications and development at MSF’s operational center in Geneva from November 2015 until June 2019. Throughout her career with MSF, Avril has contributed to major movement-wide initiatives, including the global mobilization to end attacks on hospitals and health workers. She has worked as a country director and project coordinator for MSF, leading operations to provide aid to refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in Mauritania, South Sudan, and South Africa. Avril’s strategic analysis and communications assignments have taken her to countries including Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Haiti, Iraq, Lebanon, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sudan, and Syria. From 2006 to 2012, Avril served as director of communications with MSF-Canada.

Dr. Javid Abdelmoneim is an emergency physician and president of MSF-UK. A member of the Royal College of Physicians, he joined MSF in 2009 for his first field assignment to Iraq. Since then, he has worked as a doctor with MSF in Haiti, Lebanon (for Syria), South Sudan, Sierra Leone (for Ebola), on the Mediterranean on one of MSF’s search and rescue vessels, and in Raqqa in North Syria. Javid is also a reporter for the TV health magazine show The Cure, broadcasting on the Al Jazeera network. He is the winner of the 2016 Foreign Press Association award for best science story of the year for the episode “Operation Gaza” among other honors. Javid currently works as a registrar in Emergency Medicine in Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London. Javid has been the president of MSF-UK since May 2017. 

Dr. Craig Spencer, emergency physician and MSF-USA board member, is the director of Global Health in Emergency Medicine and an assistant professor of Medicine and Population and Family Health at the Columbia University Medical Center. He divides his time between providing clinical care in New York and working internationally in public health and humanitarian response. He has worked in Africa and Southeast Asia as a field epidemiologist on numerous projects, as well as coordinating MSF’s national epidemiological response in Guinea during the Ebola outbreak. In addition to his international public health work, Craig has provided medical care in the Caribbean, Central America, West and East Africa, and most recently with MSF onboard a medical search and rescue boat in the Mediterranean. He is currently working as an emergency room doctor, responding to the COVID-19 outbreak in New York City. 

Past Events in this series:

Thursday, April 09, 2020

• Let's Talk COVID-19: Mental Health - featuring Dr. Kaz de Jong, clinical and health psychologist and head of the staff health department for MSF based in Amsterdam, and Athena Viscusi, clinical social worker and psychosocial care specialist for MSF-USA.

Thursday, April 02, 2020

• Let's Talk COVID-19: An OB-GYN on the Frontline - featuring Dr. Rasha Khoury, OB-GYN and MSF-USA board member

Thursday, March 26, 2020

• Live Chat on COVID-19: Responding to a Pandemic - featuring Northan Hurtado, deputy medical director at MSF-USA and Karin Huster, nurse and MSF project coordinator recently returned from managing our COVID-19 response in Hong Kon