Dear colleagues and supporters,
The Twice the Doctor foundation in collaboration with resident medical officers (RMOs) are currently working on a new project which will hopefully expand our reach significantly. It involves partnerships between local doctors and their patients to deliver resources to medical providers in Africa thereby expanding medical services to developing world patients.
It is envisaged that patients will help and encourage us to be “Twice the Doctor” while in a sense being “Twice the Patient”.
The concept should be seen as a ‘twinning exercise’- namely patients and doctors together contributing to providing services to other less resourced doctors and their patients in Africa. (So “while” patients here are being cared for, they are also being cared for in Africa.)
Please recall that the wage for a specially trained nurse in Ethiopia to perform tarsal surgery in order to prevent blindness from trachoma is approximately……$1 per procedure!
In countries where the annual health expenditure can be as low as $20 per capita per annum, it’s not surprising that just $1 can go an awfully long way.
(Australia spends $ 4,700 per capita p.a.-2016)
It is envisaged that RMOs will be the prime designers, managers and executors of what is hoped to be a pivotal project and as such will not only leverage their medical status in order to expand their effectiveness in providing for patients (everywhere) but also deeply engage them in a team building project of which they can be justly proud both now and in the future.
The TTD Foundation feels highly optimistic regarding the project’s potential success partly because of:
1. Relationships that have been built over a number of years with RMO associations.
2.The energy and drive displayed by RMOs in the past in support of TTD, and certainly not least of all:
3. The runs on the “board”, namely > $500,000 donated so far by you, our supporters.
Without the leveraging power of this impressive figure, I suspect this new initiative would face far stronger headwinds.
So thankyou to you our contributors for making possible what we hope will be the next considerable expansion of the good that TTD can do while providing RMOs with a potential significant firewall against burnout.
Regards to all
Rob Baume
(On behalf of the directors of Twice The Doctor foundation)