Yasmina Zaidman is Director of Communications at Acumen Fund. She recently returned from vacation in the Dominican Republic, where she personally experienced the importance of access to emergency medical care.

The hospital in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, where Yasmina and her son were fortunate enough to receive treatment.

I try not to think too much about work when I’m on vacation, but when I found myself in the back of an ambulance in the Dominican Republic this past week, I couldn’t help but think about Acumen Fund’s work on improving access to emergency care. I was holding my 17-month old baby in my arms as he vomited into a bed pan, while two young medics stood ready to check his vitals. He had acquired an acute bacterial infection, we later learned, that was leading to mild dehydration. This is a problem with a very simple solution – rehydration, with the optional treatment of antibiotics. Yet this simple solution is often not available, and dehydration is the single greatest cause of infant mortality, leading to the preventable deaths of millions of children under 5 each year.

I know how very preventable these deaths are, in part because I just saw it averted for my son. At every step in the process of getting my son the help he needed I found myself asking: “what would we do if we had no money?” First, there would be no emergency transport to a hospital or clinic (though this was only needed in this case because his illness started while we were at an international airport in a foreign country). There would have been no emergency room to check into with the swipe of a credit card. There would have been no instant diagnostics to check his blood pressure, his heart rate, his white blood cell count, which told us that his infection was bacterial and not viral. And most of all, there would have been no treatment, no IV providing the perfect combination of salt and sugar to help his body absorb the fluids that would keep his 22 lb. body functioning properly.

You don’t need a vivid imagination to see how this situation could have played out differently, and my mind kept switching from my own circumstance, in a relatively clean room, with a nurse and blood test results in hand, to a very different one. I pictured a dirt-floored room in a crowded slum or temporary shelter, my sick child in my arms, a dirty rag to wipe his mouth, and futile attempts to provide water, perhaps itself contaminated, to a child who was not tolerating liquids. I would essentially have to watch and wait to see whether his own immune system’s ability to neutralize the infection and its symptoms would outpace the deadly effects of dehydration. And too often, children lose this battle, with the result, over and over again, of death. On the very island where we just spent our holiday, in a small country just across the border, there are 400,000 children displaced by Haiti’s earthquake. How many of them will face the same illness that my son had? How many of them will survive it?

I take the helplessness I felt as I watched my son getting stuck with needles and consider the situation of a parent who isn’t lucky enough to have access to this basic medical intervention and who can’t perform the basic duty of a parent to protect their child from a preventable catastrophe.

Today, my son is his normal bright and bounding self, picking up words here and there, and anything else he can get his hands on. I’ve never been happier to be home from a vacation in my life. Not only because of the comfort of familiarity after this experience, but also because what I come back to is this work we do at Acumen Fund. The work to bring basic, yet life-sustaining goods and services to people who can’t typically afford them. Whether it is access to emergency care from 1298 in Mumbai, or affordable maternal care in Hyderabad, or rural pharmacies in Kenya, or health insurance in Pakistan, basic healthcare for families should never be out of reach. No parent should have to watch helplessly while their child battles infection when a simple diagnosis and rehydration therapy is so simple and so effective. Getting to that point is not simple, but it is the work I come back to with great gratitude, both for my own circumstances, and for the privilege of doing my own small part to bring access to healthcare to other families.

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Tags: health, On the Ground

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