In December 2016, the Magen David Adom  in Israel (MDA) hosted its second SAF workshop, with backing from the ICRC’s National Society capacity-building support advisor, Catherine Marie Martin.

The MDA is Israel’s national provider of emergency medical services. MDA staff and volunteers deliver services to a diverse range of communities within Israel that include different religious and ethnic groups. The political environment in Israel often presents a challenge to ensuring the MDA’s access, acceptance and security when working with all of these communities.

Martin, who led the workshop, described the ICRC’s approach to the SAF: “The framework itself is applicable to all contexts, but it needs to be put into the context in which the National Society is operating. Here we discussed the lessons learned by the MDA participants and saw where we can further improve their access, acceptance and security – based on the lens that they operate with.”

During the workshop, the participants were asked to analyse using the SAF any situations involving access, acceptance and security issues that they had personally experienced or were aware of. All the participants had faced numerous such situations and welcomed the opportunity to talk about them and work them through. Many of the incidents mentioned involved cultural or religious barriers as well as criminal acts that the participants had encountered directly in the field. The presentation of the case studies paved the way to a discussion of practical lessons learned which could be implemented within the MDA, and which covered a wide range of issues from cultural-sensitivity training to procedures for the provision of psychosocial services.

Raphael Herbst, an MDA paramedic working in the multi-ethnic city of Jerusalem, summed up the event: “We discussed different scenarios allowing us to deal more effectively with future situations.”

“This is not the first time that the MDA has held a workshop on Safer Access”, said Martin. “But this time the aim was to make sure that the Safer Access Framework is actually applied in the modus operandi and the day-to-day operations of the MDA”.

The MDA is now actively assessing how best to integrate and implement the conclusions from the two SAF workshops into their training and standard operating procedures on a national basis.

“The SAF is actually something that we practise in our work on a daily basis”, said Asaf Chen, an MDA paramedic and disaster-management specialist. “One of the ways we practised here was by learning from real cases, analysing and discussing them in order to think together what could have been done better.”