Recommendable! What an amazing effort!
"As historic flooding put a third of Pakistan under water and displaced 33 million people, Aga Khan University in Karachi mobilized its resources to help. Led by Adil Haider, dean of AKU’s Medical College, the response relied on its field research sites, quick disaster training, and intense collaboration. ...
So what we did is, first we leveraged the field sites. We trained 4,000 health care providers online over a few weeks. Many volunteered, many were rotated. We made them all do an hour-long course so that they knew what to expect and what to handle. And so each camp would see 300–400 people in a day, and it would cost around $3–$4 per person. That includes medications. ...
We did about 1,200–1,300 camp days across 30 to 60 different locations. We’d run them for 2 weeks or 3 weeks each. And if you do the math, with a few hundred at each camp, we ended up with 400,000 [patients treated]. ...
I saw so many patients with reflux disease, for example. It was exacerbated because a lot of the aid organizations were giving very nicely made food with rice and meat and so on. And these folks are like, “Well, we eat meat once a month. And so you give us all this like heavy, rich food, and we can’t handle it.” ...
So what we did is, first we leveraged the field sites. We trained 4,000 health care providers online over a few weeks. Many volunteered, many were rotated. We made them all do an hour-long course so that they knew what to expect and what to handle. And so each camp would see 300–400 people in a day, and it would cost around $3–$4 per person. That includes medications. ...
We did about 1,200–1,300 camp days across 30 to 60 different locations. We’d run them for 2 weeks or 3 weeks each. And if you do the math, with a few hundred at each camp, we ended up with 400,000 [patients treated]. ...
I saw so many patients with reflux disease, for example. It was exacerbated because a lot of the aid organizations were giving very nicely made food with rice and meat and so on. And these folks are like, “Well, we eat meat once a month. And so you give us all this like heavy, rich food, and we can’t handle it.” ...
We used the same command structure that we used in COVID. We basically recreated that for the floods. ...
we were able to get wonderful support from very important partners, primarily the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Gavi, the Swiss government, CIDA Canada, and lots of other partner organizations. And very importantly, we fundraised from our own internal group, our alumni and so on who supported that. ...
And then we need to create an early warning system so as the floods are coming or whatever, we can get people out of harm’s way."
And then we need to create an early warning system so as the floods are coming or whatever, we can get people out of harm’s way."
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