Developing a Global Model of Health Care Delivery

Part of Nyaya Health’s mission is to develop and disseminate a model of health care delivery in resource-poor settings throughout the world. While this may seem a little audacious for such a young organization, the recent steps the Nepal team has taken to strengthen our operations do seem to be putting Nyaya on the right track to develop such a model health care delivery system. In July alone, Nyaya has taken on a wide scope of development projects from signing a new contract that ensures a consistent source of water supply to gaining permission form the Nepali Red Cross Society for the hospital to begin blood banking and transfusion services. Nyaya even had a field-analysis conducted of the waste output and elimination practices of the hospital as part of larger effort in creating a “green” waste management system to.

Looking at this list, I’m struck by the range of projects from building basic infrastructure to cutting-edge hospital management practices. But as we work day to day here, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. In fact, it seems absolutely necessary if we want to provide a reasonable standard of care where patients don’t continue to die of conditions that would be easily treatable elsewhere in the world. And this list of recent developments is really just part of a broader systems strengthening process.

This summer, much of our work has focused on helping with the implementation of the Medic Mobile program for the community health workers to gather their epidemiological data on an electronic platform and with the implementation of an inter-departmental medicine delivery system. We have also aided in the development of evaluation processes for the daily continuing medical education lectures and quality improvement measures for the hospital. In the next phase, Nyaya will be switching to an electronic medical records system which will integrate patient clinical data across the hospital departments, pharmacy and store-room inventory data, and community health data in a system that can provide a comprehensive base for evidence-based medicine and data-driven clinical and public health services.

“Making the impossible, possible” – This is something that Greg, the Country Director of Nyaya, claimed that the organization routinely does during one our chapter’s skype calls with him last semester. At the time, I thought it was very inspirational rhetoric. This summer, we’ve witnessed Nyaya Health actually making the seemingly impossible reality. 

August calendar of morning lecture topics for health assistants
GlobeMed at Tufts chapter members will be contributing to these lectures by using Nyaya's clinical and community health databases to find relevant epidemiological information for each topic. Topics were chosen by the physicians to reflect the high-prevalence conditions seen at the hospital.