DocOnline: Clinic on Wheels – Healthcare

DocOnline – For the majority of women in rural India, access to high-quality healthcare remains a faraway dream. According to studies, gender stereotypes, a lack of resources, and access issues have a significant negative impact on the health of Indian women. Gender bias increases with distance from the national capital, according to research by Indian specialists and Harvard University, and gender preconceptions inhibit women from speaking out about their health issues. According to the survey, women are less likely to seek medical care in remote districts of Uttar Pradesh than they are in Delhi, where access to care is more readily available.

Because there aren’t enough female healthcare practitioners and it would be embarrassing for them to explain their medical concerns to a male doctor, 70% of women are denied healthcare, according to the National Family Health Survey-5.

Homemaker Zainab, 28, resides in a UP village. Since giving birth to her second child a year ago, she has experienced irregular, heavy monthly bleeding. She sought medical guidance from a nearby doctor, but it was ineffective. She can still clearly recall how ashamed she felt having to describe her ordeal to a man doctor, but she had no choice. She declined to see a different doctor when the drugs did not work because doing so would have required her to endure the same humiliation once more.

She is not alone in this. Sheeba, a mother of three who lives next door, rubs her youngest infant daughter Rinki’s skinny legs. Limited can be done for Rinki’s stunted growth due to malnutrition by her family because there are no specialists in their village and little money to travel to the city to see a doctor. Many of these women and children live in rural areas of India, where there is a severe lack of access to primary health care infrastructure.

Rural Indians do not have access to high-quality healthcare because over 75% of dispensaries, 60% of hospitals, and 80% of doctors are located in urban regions and only serve 28% of the country’s population.

DocOnline

In 2021, Vedanta and the Anil Agarwal Foundation teamed up with DocOnline as part of their CSR drive to enable healthcare services in rural India in collaboration with the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD).

The paramedic staff of the two-wheeler clinic concept, Clinic on Wheels, is hand-selected via a rigorous selection procedure and trained for providing high-quality healthcare as a sustainable CSR solution. The paramedic crew makes daily trips to NandGhars (Anganwadis) in remote rural communities to provide healthcare services, including consultations with doctors and specialists, medications, and diagnostic testing. The DocOnline team, which includes all of the doctors and paramedics, is entirely made up of female professionals in order to better serve the healthcare requirements of women.

The project has expanded from 100 communities in Phase 1 to 600 villages since it began in March 2021. Around 25 million villagers are receiving assistance through the Clinic on Wheels programme, which in just 11 months has provided over 1.5 lakh consultations, prescriptions, and diagnostic testing. Due to the lack of female healthcare personnel in the past, more than 56% of visitors are female patients who were unable to receive care.

The project changed the lives of a number of women and, in turn, a number of families by eradicating gender preconceptions that discouraged women from seeking prompt medical assistance. Additionally, it lessens their out-of-pocket expenses by over 90% by reducing the number of hospital visits they require. The project also results in an early diagnosis of symptoms and prompt treatment, which lowers the disease.