The ‘Doctors Worldwide Improving Care in Health Emergencies’ (The DICE programme) is a 9-month programme running between April and December 2020 with the aim of introducing emergency care within the Rohingya refugee camps, Cox’s Bazar Bangladesh.
Our DICE deployments are soon coming to a close in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, so we thought it would be interesting for you to get a better sense of the purpose and reasoning behind our selected medical faculty’s decision to work with us on this emergency health project. Our medical team consists of an Emergency Medicine (EM) nurse, an EM Specialist, a Primary Care Specialist and an Obstetrics and Gynaecology Specialist who will be training and mentoring DICE participants (medical officers, nurses, medical assistant, and clinical managers) and working on strengthening primary care clinics in the refugee camps until the end of the month.
Today, we are going to delve deeper into the decision behind their application to work on the DICE project: what made this programme stand out to them and why do they think it was an important role for them to fill?
“We have such a lot of privileges in the UK. It has been hard adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic, people have had a lot of heartbreak as a result of it and healthcare staff have worked very hard in difficult circumstances. But we still have universal healthcare, free at the point of access. That is not the same everywhere. Imagine on top of that being displaced from home without access to even the basics of a safe place to live and think what a health challenge that represents. The [Bangladeshi] doctors working in the camps are mostly young, motivated by altruism and spurred on by a sense of social justice.”
– Primary Care & Medical Education Specialist, Prof. Kay Mohanna.
“DWW is a very well-known organization in the humanitarian spectrum, responsible for implementing projects that make an impact in communities in low income countries all over the world and DICE is one of them. The ambitions and purposes of this project are going to influence and support thousands of people in the Rohingya refugee community in Cox’s Bazar. It is with pride that I am involved in this project helping to create and improve a better health system.”
– Emergency Medicine Nurse, Susana Gil.
“We have previously worked in Bangladesh and in Thailand, providing healthcare for people displaced from Myanmar. We have, therefore, followed the media reports of the Rohingya people arriving in Bangladesh. We became aware of the DICE project through a colleague who was already involved in the work.”
– Emergency Medicine Specialist, Dr James Hayton & Obstetrics and Gynaecology Specialist, Dr Andrene Hamilton.
The DICE programme will be running until mid-December 2020. We aim to continue the development of emergency care across several more health clinics within the Rohingya camps and host communities in 2021 focusing on emergency unit development and capacity building of doctors, nurses and medical assistants.
Keep an eye out next week for the second instalment of our ‘Meet the Medical Faculty’ series, where we ask: what are you looking forward to achieving during this deployment?
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Read more about our work in Bangladesh / Support Doctors Worldwide.
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