Det er der også god brug for i lande, hvor sundhedsvæsenet er af en standard, vi vanskeligt kan forestille os herhjemme – værktøjet hedder i dette tilfælde “Crowd sourcing” og det satser på at forhindre den enkelte patient i at falde gennem de mange huller i systemet.
KATHMANDU, 20 December 2013 (IRIN): An Internet campaign to solicit (stille med) funds for the medical procedures (behandling) of individual patients in rural Nepal is increasing donor awareness and healthcare provider accountability, public health practitioners say.
Nyaya Health, a non-profit organization that runs a hospital in the Achham District of Nepal’s Far West development region, some 422 km from the capital, Kathmandu, launched a website in 2013 that chronicles individual patients’ urgent medical needs and allows donors to fund part of the procedure.
“I do not believe we need everyone who cares about global health to invest in this fashion, but I do think it is very compelling (virker meget overbevisende) to make those interested invest in and understand the challenge the sick and poor face across the world,” Mark Arnoldy, Nyaya Health’s executive director, told IRIN.
Practitioners say the model, dubbed “crowd fund health”, has the potential to transform popular understanding of poverty and health issues, and hold healthcare providers accountable (til ilden /ansvarlige).
Citing anecdotal (vilkårlig) information about trends in crowd-sourced fundraising, Jon Sotsky, director of strategy and assessment at the US-based Knight Foundation, said that “the personalized stories and smaller total amounts needed to achieve impact appear to attract donors”.
He pointed to a 2013 Knight Foundation report that explores the emergence of “civic tech,” including some Internet-based fundraising campaigns.
Comprehensive (altomfattende) care
Saroj Dhital, a surgeon who founded Nepal’s Public Health Concern Trust, visited the Nyaya hospital in Achham in late 2013.
Soon after arriving, he said, “a delirious (forvildet) man in his seventies was there with his right foot gangrenous (angrebet af koldbrand) and stinking. It had taken him four or five days to walk [to the hospital].”
After a gruelling and complicated procedure, the surgical team successfully amputated the man’s leg, but the work had only begun.
“The mechanical part of the healthcare was done, but so many questions needed to be answered. It is not only about his rehabilitation, not only about his nutrition, not only about the control of his diabetes”, Dhital stated, adding:
“There are very large questions and issues around the very meaning of healthcare”.
Flesh-eating bacteria
He noted a case where a woman had been presented with flesh-eating bacteria that required surgery.
The team operated, salvaging (redde) her affected limb, but Dhital said, “It will take time. It will drain resources. Treatment requires her and her poor husband to be in hospital, far away from their small village in Bajura where their four children are left without anything to eat.”
Nyaya’s Arnoldy sees crowdfunding as a step in the direction of being able to provide this type of comprehensive care for the poor. “Most important for us as healthcare providers is that crowd funding is much more than a new source of financing,” he said.
“The very standards it inherently (uvægerligt) demands as a model – that patients are identifiable … and costs will be made transparent – have led us to create a new national referral network in Nepal,” he said, adding that case costs advertised by the Nyaya Health campaign include everything from diagnosis to follow-up care.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that referral care – what happens once a patient leaves the clinic after an initial diagnosis with instructions to follow up – is a common weakness of health systems in developing countries.
And in some cases less than a quarter of patients sent for referral care actually follow up.
Learning by doing
Læs videre på
http://www.irinnews.org/report/99366/crowd-sourcing-nepal-s-rural-healthcare
