The tip of the iceberg: latest from Developing Health 2011

JachinDanielraj is an inspiring lady. She is an Indian doctor now based at the famous Christian Medical College in Vellore. But she hasn’t always been in this big centre. She spent 13 years in a rural mission hospital, working hard to serve the poor. She told us the story of a child who made her change direction;

Hospital care

‘We admitted a child with post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis – a common complication of scabies. He did very well and I discharged him after two weeks, feeling very pleased with myself. But as I chatted to his family about the village they were returning to, I heard that their son was just one of six children with the same condition. Two died. The remaining four had gone to the traditional healer in the village, who had chanted mantras, sacrificed chickens and applied herbs – and two further children died. The remaining two went to see a quack doctor who gave IV fluids and assorted drugs – another one died. The child in front of me was the one who had survived these ordeals, and thankfully was now better. But what about the other five who I hadn’t even seen?

Community care
I realised that the patients I was seeing are just a tiny fraction of all the people needing medical help.  I stopped to look up from my hectic clinical work – was this really what I was here for? My husband and I sat up late into the night, discussing a way forward. There are very few health workers in the rural areas, but there are many churches, and they send evangelists into the villages with the gospel. Why couldn’t they take basic health care as well? It’s not difficult to treat scabies – if those six children had been treated in the village, none of them need ever have got glomerulonephritis. And so it was that I moved to Vellore and started a training programme for village evangelists. We have now trained 800 – imagine how many people they can reach.’

Thinking outside the box

1.3 billion people have no access to basic healthcare – that’s one fifth of the world’s population! Working in clinics and hospitals, it’s so easy to forget that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Jachin’s story was a big challenge to think outside the box and find ways to reach the neediest people on the planet – the ones we healthcare professionals forget.

Posted by Vicky Lavy