insideSUSSEX Magazine Issue 01 - March 2015 | Page 93

CHARITY

The VIRTUAL DOCTORS:
LINKING RURAL AREAS IN ZAMBIA TO MEDICAL
SPECIALISTS WORLDWIDE
THE VIRTUAL DOCTORS, A S
D TELEMEDICINE CHARITY, COULD BE ABOUT TO
BECOME PART OF THE MEDICAL CURRICULUM AT THE MAIN CLINICAL TRAINING COLLEGE
IN ZAMBIA’S CAPITAL, LUSAKA. WITH THE MAJORITY OF CLINICAL OFFICERS AND MEDICAL
LICENTIATES BEING TRAINED AT CHAINAMA COLLEGE OF HEALTH SCIENCES, THE
DEVELOPMENT COULD LEAD TO A COUNTRYWIDE ROLLOUT OF THE PROJECT WHICH
BEGAN JUST UNDER TWO YEARS AGO.

The Virtual Doctors was set up to help
improve the local primary healthcare in some
of the most remote and impoverished areas
of Africa – where people regularly walk or
cycle long distances to their nearest clinic or
referral hospital, and even then often receive
inadequate treatment or diagnosis due to the
centre being under-resourced.
Using local broadband networks, The Virtual
Doctors can link remote rural health centres
in Zambia to doctors and medical specialists
in the UK, and around the world, who provide
much needed diagnosis and treatment advice.
Zambia’s growing population of 15 million is
only served by about 1,200 doctors; about half
that number leaves the country each year to
work abroad. The remaining doctors – about
the same number as work at Brighton’s Royal
Sussex County Hospital – are mainly based
in urban areas, leaving the two-thirds of the
population living in rural areas without access to
a doctor.
The Virtual Doctors’ director, Huw Jones, recalls
the time he picked up a man cycling his heavily
pregnant wife to a hospital in remote eastern
Zambia: “I had found her blood on the road long
before I picked them up. He had taken her to
the rural health centre just outside their village,
but the clinic staff could not help them. With no
ambulance available, he took the only option

he had, to try and cycle his wife to the nearest
hospital, over 100kms away. By the time I found
them she was in a very poor state and she very
sadly and very quietly passed away in the back
of my