How EMGuidance Is Saving Lives In South Africa

Curated Story
This article originally appeared on Forbes

“As a rural doctor, many times you find yourself without help, and a lot of times you feel very alone and scared because you're making decisions that ultimately could result in the loss of a life. That feeling of being alone and unsure isn't spoken about a lot in medicine. We're making sure that other doctors don't need to go through what we went through. “-- Dr. Mohammed Dalwai

While working in Northern Pakistan as an emergency doctor with Doctors Without Borders, Mohammed Dalwai saw first-hand how crucial timing can be. At the end of a long shift at a remote hospital, he discovered an unattended patient in the emergency room. He rushed to her, but she was already dead. The cause was an injury that could have been treated had it been identified early and triaged correctly. This early experience had a lasting impact on Mohammed, bringing him to realize how vulnerable healthcare providers are to making mistakes that could be avoided with accurate information and treatment guidelines at hand. 

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Ashoka insight

Across the world, many individuals and communities lack access to high quality and affordable healthcare, caused for example by the remoteness of their community, lack of means to pay for healthcare support, by culture, conflict or other causes. Recognizing the need to increase healthcare access for disadvantaged communities, social entrepreneurs are creating new, visionary solutions aimed to provide suitable healthcare services and in certain cases eventually even transform healthcare systems to increase the healthcare available to people and communities.The Philips Foundation and Ashoka are cooperating in a multi-year program to accelerate access to healthcare around the world by connecting social entrepreneurship with industry skills and exploring collaborative action between Philips Foundation and Ashoka fellows like Mohammed.