The woman was trying to make her breathing medicine last, a drop at a time.

She had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and feared running out. By the time she reached Dr. Alok Pradhan’s team in Nepal’s Nuwakot district as part of a mobile medical deployment with the Nepal Red Cross Society, she was struggling to breathe, and her blood oxygen level was low. The clinicians gave her a full dose of medication and stabilized her, Pradhan said.

“Can you imagine that?” he said of how little medicine she had been using.

During a six-day deployment about two weeks after devastating floods swept through the region, Pradhan found that many of the most pressing needs involved illnesses that had preceded the disaster and the psychological toll of surviving it.

Where his team worked, a health care facility stood on the other side of a river. Both bridges connecting residents to it had been swept away.…