Pictured: A Clinical Officer and Virtual Doctors service user with patient.
Our aim is to help improve the local primary healthcare in some of the most remote and impoverished areas of sub-Saharan Africa. We believe our telemedicine model could be adopted beyond Africa, making a significant impact on primary healthcare worldwide"
A huge thank you from the Virtual Doctors to everyone that donated to our Radio 4 Appeal. We have raised an incredible £34,659 towards the expansion of our telemedicine service, equipping and training more frontline health workers in rural areas to give them access to diagnosis and treatment support from medical doctors. Since the Appeal we are supporting 40 new facilities and have gained 50 new volunteer doctors.
Our Appeal told the story of George, a clinical officer (similar training to a UK nurse practitioner) in a rural clinic in Malawi benefiting from the Virtual Doctors service: Using our custom built app on the mobile handset we provided, George was able to seek advice from one of our volunteer Virtual Doctor medical professionals when a woman, pregnant with twins and in labour, came into his clinic with symptoms of severe pre-eclampsia, a life-threatening obstetric condition. A UK-based obstetrician advised him on how to lower her high-blood pressure and speed up her labour; later that night George was able to safely deliver both babies. One year on, the twins are doing well.
An already experienced medical professional, George will keep this new knowledge with him and share it with other isolated colleagues of the virtual peer community he joined when becoming a VDrs service user. Beyond the immediate impact on patients, the Virtual Doctors and the multiplier effect of knowledge sharing, changes lives with its educational focus as the Volunteers share their medical expertise, guiding and empowering the Clinical Officers, who pass on the knowledge to their peers.
The Appeal has been incredibly beneficial to the Charity not just in terms of raising much-needed funds: it has raised our profile and increased our following significantly, attracting many new repeat donors (as our following Covid-19 Appeal showed) and new volunteer doctors, but also added credibility, resulting for instance in a partnership with Malawi’s leading telecom provider.
A few months on from our Appeal, we are very close to our target of serving 150 sites in Zambia and Malawi, expanding our reach significantly. We are now preparing to focus on updating our unique custom-built telemedicine app to support the growing volume of traffic and facilitate the expansion into new countries to adapt it to their requirements.
You can find out more about our charity .