Abstract
During the Syrian civil war, Syrian refugees crossed the Israeli border to receive
medical treatment. During this time, Galilee Medical Center (GMC) became the main
center for multidisciplinary treatment of these war-wounded patients. This retrospective
study compares the demographics of local Israeli and refugee Syrian patients, as well
as the volume and types of procedures each group received over a 5-year period. From
January 2013 to December 2017, 963 unique patients underwent 1,751 procedures in the
GMC Plastic Surgery Department. Of these patients, 176 were Syrian—including 42 children—and
787 were Israeli. These groups underwent 393 and 1,358 procedures, respectively, for
a procedure-per-patient ratio of 2.23 versus 1.72, respectively. On average, Syrian
patients tended to be younger than Israeli patients (23.6 vs. 49.25 years), had longer
median hospitalization time (50 vs. 8 days), longer median operative times (102 vs.
85 minutes), and higher incidence of infection with multidrug-resistant bacteria (52.2
vs. 5.8%). Further, Syrian patients had more trauma-related procedures, such as skin
grafts, wound debridement, and microsurgery, than Israeli patients. Through this process,
GMC's plastic surgery department gained unprecedented exposure to a variety of complex
procedures.
Keywords
Syrian war - civil war - plastic surgery - health care service - Galilee Medical Center
