SALAM shows how crisis can interrupt medication, follow-up and access to familiar health services for people living with chronic conditions
A chronic condition does not pause because a border has been crossed. A heart that needs monitoring, a treatment that requires follow-up, a prescription that runs out next week, none of these wait for stability to return. Yet when displacement, conflict or economic collapse force people to move, the healthcare systems they relied on rarely move with them.
This is the fracture that SALAM brings into focus: not the absence of healthcare in crisis settings, but the breakdown of its continuity. A gap that is easy to overlook and devastating to experience. SALAM frames continuity of care as what it is: not a logistical detail, but a core condition for protecting health access in fragile contexts. One that requires rethinking how care is designed, delivered and sustained when populations are on the move and systems are under stress.
People fleeing violence do not only leave behind belongings. They leave behind the systems that kept them stable: a nearby clinic, a familiar healthcare worker, a referral pathway, a caregiver’s routine, the medication they knew they would need tomorrow. What was once manageable becomes precarious overnight. A caregiver may no longer know where to turn. Transport may become inaccessible. Documents may be lost. The nearest point of care may change without notice. For people living with chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory illness) each of these small disruptions can trigger a cascade of clinical consequences.
Access to healthcare, in other words, is not only about whether services exist. It is about whether people can stay connected to them when everything around them becomes unstable.
Sometimes the fracture reveals itself in the starkest terms. In one account shared by Caritas Lebanon, the situation was summed up in a single choice: “People are being forced to choose between medicine and food.”. The same account recalled a beneficiary who asked for the cash value of his monthly medication so he could buy bread for his family instead. It is a small story, but it exposes the wider mechanism with painful clarity. When crisis deepens, continuity of care is often broken not by a single dramatic event, but by the accumulation of impossible choices made under unbearable pressure.
The figures shared by Caritas Lebanon put that pressure into scale. In March, they reported 1.2 million displaced people across Lebanon, 134,439 internally displaced people hosted in shelters, and 636 collective shelters. Within the same emergency response, 22,944 health services reached 8,262 beneficiaries. These numbers do not tell the whole story. But they make one point hard to ignore: when people are forced to move, continuity of care becomes much harder to protect. The gap between the scale of displacement and the capacity of health systems to maintain continuity is enormous. And it is in that gap that the most vulnerable (chronic patients, elderly people, caregivers without support) are most at risk of falling through.
This is the reality that gives urgency to SALAM’s work. Not a theoretical discussion about healthcare innovation, but a concrete effort to build more connected, resilient and accessible pathways to care; precisely where those pathways are most likely to break.Because when crisis disrupts everything else, care still needs a way to continue.
Last Update
11/05/2026
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