Aiming Help Where People Receive Care
Direct Relief focuses on strengthening existing, fragile health systems in poor areas with resources that enable the trained health workers already there to address the tremendous needs. The effect is that doctors, nurses, and midwives can care for people who are sick or hurt and have no money and, in turn, give these people in vulnerable situations the chance to survive and realize their inherent human potential. It is in these effects that the value in human terms is realized for the money spent.
Direct Relief’s medical assistance programs equip health professionals working in resource-poor communities to better meet the challenges of diagnosing, treating, and caring for people without regard to politics, religion, gender, race, or ability to pay.
In Malawi, for example, Direct Relief has worked for several years with the Dean of the Medical College, who has trained the small cadre of Malawian doctors running the health system (about 250 physicians are working in a country of 13 million people). Those physicians, and their health worker colleagues, care daily for many HIV positive and AIDS patients – but they also deliver babies, set broken bones, and do everything else. The targeted, medical-material support Direct Relief provides enables them to work, in itself important for the broad goal of public health. But “public health” requires that real people get health services. This happens when the doctors are able to diagnose and treat patients who are sick or hurt, have little or no money to pay, and otherwise would go without.
Strengthening frontline clinics in poor areas, both around the world and in the U.S., also creates a network for responding to disasters, which often hit poor people hardest and stress these very same health facilities caring for newly impoverished people.