Dawn – Venezuela (FEVESOCEM)

Name of the activity: Dawn

Country/NMO: Venezuela (FEVESOCEM)

Program: Ethics & Human Rights in Health

Contact information: [email protected]; [email protected]

Type of the activity: Third Party Activities

General description:

This is a social project called “Dawn”. This term refers directly to “The light before the sunset”. So, this is what we want to do. We want to create light in the middle of the night and make people feel hope again even when the outlook looks grey. Medical students could be agents of change for a group of vulnerable people, and make them have a voice and feel hear. We need to create empathy on the students even when they are on their first years of academy, cause this will be the way that we are going to be doctors of sick people, not sickness itself. We need to know the patient, their needs, their hopes, their fears and started to see medicine by a humanitarian eye and this work start in our communities.

Focus area:

Medical Ethics (Patient Centered Care, Good Medical Practice, direct doctor-patient relationship)

Problem statement:

Actually, Venezuela is going through tough times. We have not official statistics about poverty, but it is estimated that by 2018 at least 82% of homes are on this social position. By 2017, underlying inflation was calculated on 2.735% according to experts’ economists. This situation cause difficulty on acquisitive power and in consequence makes that quality life has been lower for all Venezuelan people the last couple of years.
That causes a lot of despairs in people, and it is common that even professionals, doctors, and students of all universities decide to emigrate to find new opportunities. Actually, university desertion is calculated by 50% on 2018. In our hospitals we saw a lot of patients and their families in debt, and if they have enough money to at least covered the patient’s treatment, they don’t have enough to eat at least twice a day.
So, after explaining this heartbreaking situation, we prepared a project to bring joy and hope again on patients, doctors and med students, to motivate them to keep fighting for their country and inspired them to create positive environment at least for one day.

Target groups and beneficiaries:

Target Group: Medical Students, professional organizations
Beneficiaries: Medical students, vulnerable groups and patients

Objectives and indicators of success:

• Create the value of empathy on medical students. Make them appreciate every stage of life and understanding their needs
• Create a positive environment to everyone involve in the activity.
• Motivate medical students to create better doctors-patients relationship.
• Expose realities of vulnerable people and how are their rights and their access to a healthy and honored life

Indicators of succes:

We are going to create formularies to all of the participants on this activity, to know their opinion and how mind changing was this progress through the year.

We are going to create a data to know about vulnerable groups on ours hospitalizations areas, nursing homes, orphanage, etc and a goal measurer to get to know how many people is being benefit by the actions of this project and their feelings about it.

Create articles about our discoveries in every area and how are the rights and life of the benefit ones.

Methodology:

We are working by stages of life.

From January to April we are going to work with pediatric people. We are going to organize visit to our hospitalization areas and we are going to find out how many vulnerable people is there and we are going to plan how to take part of that. We are going to provide them a day or as many as every city plans with joy, plays, teaching them skills as music, painting, dancing and we are going to try to supply at least a breakfast or a lunch to them or their families.

From May to August we are going to work with general population on poverty zone. We are going to organized a working day with them, providing them free medical attention by our specialist and general doctors, sharing their experiencies, play with the kids, giving them information about diseases as breast cancer, prostatic cancer, its, vih, depression, infectology. Create a survey to know how is working health access for them. Investigate about nutritional diagnosis.

From September to December we are going to work with elderly people on nursing home. We are going to share experiencies, talked to them, giving them a cultural day in alliance with musicians, dancers and artist. We are going to indagate about signs of depression in them, how are they feeling about the place, how are their rights, their nutritional diagnosis.

This is just a guide structure. Every working group could propose new things to add to improve the activity and create even more benefits on every population.

Plans for evaluation:

Find out how many beneficiaries are for the designed area of work on every stage. For example: Found out how many pediatric people are hospitalized on our local hospital.

Make a goal measurer of benefits from every working day.

Create a pre-activity survey on items as empathy, doctor-patient relationships, value of stage of life, rights of kids and elderly people.

Create and evaluation survey after every stage of work to find out the impact of this actions and to get feedbacks and opinions.

Comparison table of ideas before and after the activity about the subjects above.

Create a publication of pictures, goals, benefits from all the societies who participate in the project

General goal: Benefit 280 persons on 2018