What do we intend to do with this?

What do we intend to do with this?

Before I proceed further with the posts from North India, I thought It would be useful to share this with you. Bear with me- it’s a longish post.

Over the last one and a half years, as the project of getting in touch with our outreach alumni was being planned, we thought as to what use can be made of the collected information. By us, I mean all the people I discussed the project with, inside and out of the Institute.

Many wonderful suggestions have come in:

    a)The academic mandate- the requirements that the doctors have are quite varied. They often handle cases out of their core expertise eg. Surgeon or obstetrician dealing with paediatrics/ neurology/dermatology etc. So there is a very real requirement to augment their knowledge base to the extent that they can handle a majority of these cases confidently. Regional CMEs and regular (monthly) medical newsletters seem to be the way forward here. Structured courses at St John’s are also being considered.

   b)Capacity building for the outreach hospitals- where possible to help them out with advice on hospital systems, human resources, and legalities.( I can already hear sounds of – ‘put your house in order first’  ) Their requirements are often quite finite and do able. Also, as St John’s  as also a number of tertiary care centres have been through the teething trouble in lots of issues, we can advise them on pitfalls to avoid.

      c) Specialist help for remote doctors: With increased broadband penetrance, it will be possible in the near future to offer those teleservices, even ‘real time’. It is a dream for specialists to step in and spend some time in these centres, but where there is a will……..

      d)Establishment of a cell/ office in campus to help outreach doctors: There is nothing which works as well as having a physical presence in the parent Institute.( There is often a case of – Out of sight, out of mind!) They will then be able to articulate their requirements regularly. One of the forums  is the Sister Doctors Forum of India.

)    e)Creating a document honouring their work and lives: The blog is just a very small beginning. We have a team in St John’s working on an audiovisual presentation with this material. Also all collected material will be handed over to the History of St John’s Museum set up by Dr Mario Vaz. Though my own trips are few in comparison to the large numbers, I hope in time we will be able to collect information and pictorial documents of as many of our doctors as possible. We have multiple plans to address that issue eg. Encouraging students to visit the centres close to home on their vacations.

 The ramifications of reaching out are many as you can see (I am not even mentioning the obvious intangibles) and we will not only be helping them but growing ourselves.

 

While on this topic, I have a point to make.The focus , I feel has been too much on ‘ What has St John’s done for us?’, ‘What is the point of doing anything?’, 'Look at the multiple ways we have been screwed over?’. This gives rise to an all pervading cynicism, which is transmitted to the younger generations, who then leave the Institute with no role models, no goodwill for the alma mater and often a sense of misplaced entitlement. Make no mistake- no one is a role model for pointing fingers, but for affecting change. Also, our locus standi as Johnites would then have to be attributed to our uniqueness as individuals alone and not in any measure to the Institute itself. (Sorry to be preachy, but my spiel is less JFK, more Jerry Maguire)

I refuse to be an apologist for anyone and believe everyone is capable of defending themselves. So I will not take up cudgels on anyone’s behalf. But I would encourage all naysayers to reflect on their roles as positive influences. Or just look at it this way- where has all this bickering, trying to ‘name and shame’ etc got us? Let us not try to hide behind ‘we call it as we see it’? Do we see or can we ever see enough for us to make that call?

From my recent experiences at least, I am deeply humbled by the lives and work I am seeing. And that is not only in the outreaches, but here in St John’s as well as well as in the cities, very often done quietly without fanfare- their satisfaction of a job well done is reward enough for them.

Enough said.