Medical team to northern Namibia

Imagine if your child needed their appendix out, but you weren't confident that they would survive the surgery. Or if you needed your broken arm straightened, but you could only get the operation late next week in a hospital 400km away. This is the reality for many people in developing countries. In fact 2 billion people around the world struggle to get access to an operation when they need one, and when they do the chances of dying from the surgery or the anaesthetic could be 100 times higher than if they lived in Australia, the United States or the UK. I am yet to meet a single person living in Africa or SE Asia who asked for it to be this way. Invariably it comes from the luck of where you happened to be born.

 

After I qualified as a doctor it took me another 7 years of training and exams to qualify as an anaesthetist. In Namibia, outside of the capital Windhoek, there is only one qualified anaesthetist for the whole country (population 2.5 million). The other doctors giving anaesthetics have not had more than 3 months of experience, and no formal training or exams, before they are sent to rural hospitals to work unsupervised and unsupported. If they give the wrong intravenous fluid to a patient with a head injury, that person will die. If they give the wrong drug to a child during an anaesthetic, that child will die.

 

At the end of May I will be leading a team of 3 anaesthetists, one anaesthetic nurse, and 2 obstetrician/gynaecologists to a large hospital in the far north of Namibia. This hospital serves a large portion of the population of Namibia and also of southern Angola. We will not be there to perform surgery, but rather to provide education and training to the doctors there so that they can perform the surgery themselves more safely after we have gone. All in our team are paying their own expenses - flights, accommodation, meals etc. All are taking time away from their work and families to improve healthcare in another country. Some of us who are self-employed will also receive no income while we are away. I am hoping to raise money to cover transport costs once we are in the country, and educational aids and equipment for the hospital doctors, for this trip and future trips. 

Every dollar received will directly help to improve the standard of healthcare for patients in Namibia. As the saying goes, give someone a fish and they will eat for a day, but teach them to fish and they will eat for a lifetime.