Philanthropic donations directly saving lives in communities

First published in The Australian Financial Review, December 2020

Mark Eggleton

If 2020 has taught us anything it’s how inextricably linked global economic prosperity is to health and how fragile our economy is to the effects of a global pandemic. It is a year that has highlighted how important access to healthcare is for all of us.

Yet providing healthcare for all is sometimes out of reach for many governments and that’s where the global philanthropic sector can step up to the plate. Earlier this year, research by Global Citizen, an anti-poverty group, found while global philanthropy had increased markedly over the past 40 years, the world’s wealthiest could still do more.

One particular criticism was some of the world’s richest individuals tend to give to private charitable foundations where the money often doesn’t get spent for many years whereas the most effective way to give is to put the money straight to work by giving direct charitable grants to beneficiaries.

In a list of some of the world’s top charitable givers put together by Forbes magazine, particular emphasis was put on those giving directly and unsurprisingly, some of the largest donors were those already known such as Warren Buffet and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Closer to home, Australia’s Humpty Dumpty Foundation is one organisation that provides direct assistance to beneficiaries and it has been doing it for more than 30 years. The Foundation is a children’s charity that purchases essential and often life-saving medical equipment for sick and injured children in paediatric wards, neonatal units, maternity and emergency departments in hospitals across Australia.

The Zuber family has been a donor to the Humpty Dumpty Foundation over these past three decades and they say the “beauty of Humpty is everyone can identify with children in need and every child deserves access to the best available healthcare”.

What this means for the Northern Territory is they now have life-saving equipment that can transport babies and keep them stable in the air as they’re flown to major hospitals in capital cities such as Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney on board Careflight.

“We have patients with some of the highest health needs in the nation, but our small population means that we don’t have access to some specialised services like cardiac surgery for children. This transport cot means that our patients can access treatments not previously available to them,” Woodward says.

The long-time Westpac Treasurer and soon-to-retire Zuber says donations don’t have to be tied to a large piece of equipment because even smaller pieces can make a huge difference in rural and remote areas.

“There’s nothing more heartbreaking when a parent loses a child because a local hospital didn’t have access to a piece of equipment and that particular machine might have been worth just $2000 or less,” he says.

A case in point is in the Northern Territory where the Humpty Dumpty Foundation has donated handheld echocardiogram (ECG) machines to help monitor heart health in children in remote communities.

Royal Darwin Hospital paediatrician Dr Louise Woodward says these machines are proving vital in remote communities where rheumatic heart disease remains an issue despite being eradicated in most of Australia.

Moreover, Dr Woodward says these machines assist Aboriginal healthcare workers to better serve their communities by screening local children for heart disease and picking up symptoms early.

The training around their usage is also “giving local health workers additional skills in remote communities where there is already a lack of employment opportunities, adequate housing and sometimes hope”.

For Woodward, she has never come across another charity that is so focused on improving child health outcomes so directly.

“They’re genuinely closing the gap and helping us do our work,” she says. “They listen to what we want and what we need on the ground.”

For example, the Humpty Dumpty Foundation was able to purchase Royal Darwin Hospital a $300,000 neonatal transport incubator which is basically “an intensive care unit on wheels for a baby”.

“Since receiving the intensive care cot we have transported over 20 babies in the last 18 months that would have died without that equipment. It’s sophisticated equipment that keeps even the sickest of babies stable in the air.

“Transporting newborns is very specialised and requires sophisticated equipment which is particularly important for us in the Northern Territory because we are so remote and our neonatal mortality rate is much higher than anywhere else in Australia,” she says.

It’s a reason why the Foundation’s direct support is so vitally important and it’s something that particularly resonates with Zuber.

“Sometimes it can be a little hard to see where your charitable donations might be going, but with the Humpty Dumpty Foundation your name is associated directly with a piece of equipment.”

He says one way to approach giving to the Humpty Dumpty Foundation is to team up with a group of people and come together to purchase a piece of equipment.

“I know people approach giving in different ways but with the Foundation, you can feel it, touch it and see exactly what your giving has done and (if you want) go to where it is and see it making a difference,” Zuber concludes.

When Sebastian Atze was born, his parents Tiffany and Mathew were a little unprepared as their second child had decided to arrive three weeks early on Christmas Eve in 2014. But after a normal pregnancy and an uncomplicated birth in the small local hospital at Loxton, South Australia, Tiffany was excited to meet her new little boy.

It wasn’t long after Sebastian’s arrival that Tiffany and her nurses noticed that he was struggling to breathe so his doctor placed a call to Adelaide Women’s and Children’s Hospital who agreed to send a medical team by helicopter the 250kms to Loxton. In the meantime, Sebastian’s X-rays showed he had a congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH), a life-threatening condition in babies.

At 5am on Christmas Day, Sebastian and Tiffany arrived in Adelaide where Sebastian underwent life-saving surgery. While the initial surgery was successful there were complications that followed and Sebastian faced more surgery on New Year’s Day, and his parents were told to prepare for the worst.

Thankfully, Sebastian pulled through but both he and his parents faced months of uncertainty about his ongoing surgeries, when he’d be allowed home and how his specialised care was going to be managed in a small country town that didn’t even have a full-time doctor.

Sebastian had to be fed chemically by a line that ran straight to a vein close to his heart. The method of feeding, called Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN), delivers all the nutrients the body needs but can also place the patient, in this case a small baby, at high risk of infection and needs constant monitoring.

Living in Pinnaroo, a rural town located near the border between South Australia and Victoria, and an hour from Loxton, meant that not only did Tiffany and Mathew need to receive training on administering daily TPN, but the medical staff at Pinnaroo also needed to upskill as well.