One day...

One of the reasons that I want to become a doctor is so that I can help those people who need it the most but just because I have 6 more years until I graduate it doesn't mean that I still can't help out where possible.

In the UK we're lucky enough to have the NHS which, though some times annoying to deal with, provides us with all the medical care that we need free of charge in the moment. Unfortunately this is not the reality for e majority of people living around the world today. Because of this I'm saving up so that I can go on a medical/missionary volunteer placement next summer (which gives me plenty of time to save up! Haha) and here are a few of the places that I want to visit:

Morocco (Africa) - Recently there was an article on NYTimes.com detailing the dire situation that the Moroccan health care system is in - they are suffering from a lack of doctors and equipment to deal with the 33 million strong population who need medical attention. Pain relief medication such as morphine is rationed for only those in extreme pain, so much so that a woman who had been run over by a car was denied pain relief. Any machinery they do have does not work as it should - one machine detected a pulse of 265 (which isn't possible anyway) on a baby that had already been declared dead. The W.H.O.’s aim “is to help Morocco implement universal health coverage for everybody without catastrophic spending for the state...”   

Peru (South America) - The Peruvian healthcare system sufferers from not having enough funding in order to provide adequate care to its population. In the past the Government has tried to make it more readily available by providing subsides to children, pregnant women and those without health insurance.  But even with these subsides the majority of the population are still unable to pay for the care that they need.

Czech Republic (Europe) - Just over a year ago the Czech government introduced a series of changes which have sought to improve the standard of care for the population. Before these reforms the Czech healthcare system was facing a number of problems such as doctors refusing to treat patients who didn't follow their treatment plan, the referring of patients to specialists over issues which could be dealt with by GP's, poor medical equipment, lack of communication between GP's and hospital doctors. With all this being said the standard of care provided is decent and these new reforms have tried to tackle these issues but there's still work to do.

Thailand (Asia) - One of the major issues with the healthcare in Thailand is that the majority of doctors are specialists and not GP's making that little bit harder for a diagnosis to be reached if a persons illness is made up of more than one thing. Another issue with this is that it forces patients to pay for the more expensive treatment in hospitals. But as with Czech republic the standard of care is good its just not widely accessible

xo The Girl