ACCESSIBLE HEALTHCARE THROUGH TELEMEDICINE

With its considerable size and small population, Namibia is one of the world’s top destinations when it comes to enjoying unspoilt natural beauty and seemingly limitless space. Lodges are often situated in remote areas at substantial distances from towns and human presence. The perfect getaway – until you need a doctor.

It’s exactly this problem that inspired Dr Armid Azadeh to start Macquarie Medical Care and launch Namibia’s first telemedicine service provider called Dr MacQ. His inspiration behind this groundbreaking form of medical care stems from visiting lodge-owner friends at one of their lodges. Enquiring about medical facilities for the staff he was told that when ill they would spend two to three days away from work to visit the local clinic due to the distance to get there and back. Apart from missing additional workdays, there are no doctors at those clinics, basic facilities with only nurses and medicine.

As a result, Dr Azadeh started providing an ad hoc telemedicine service to his friends’ lodges for their staff and guests. Soon, however, this evolved into an official service for subscribed lodges that includes fully-fledged medical records of employees, advising and helping with on-site medication and food checkups. By developing an app specifically for the tourism sector Dr MacQ’s on-call doctors have quick access to staff’s medical history. In return, employees can easily reach the doctor via video call. The same applies to guests should they become ill or have any medical queries.

With Covid-19 effectively shutting down all tourism for several months in 2020, Dr MacQ was forced to concentrate on marketing to businesses in urban areas, especially Windhoek. According to Dr Azadeh companies were quick to see value in the service they could provide, and realised that a telemedicine solution is an obvious choice to keep up productivity in these unprecedented times. His background in pandemic planning also came to the fore in being able to develop protocols and policies for companies in terms of best practices to keep individual staff as well as the entire office as protected and productive as possible. With companies encouraging staff to work from home, hospitals becoming full and doctors not being able to see patients, telemedicine emerged as an excellent and effective tool to provide healthcare to employees. Urban centres to a large extent suffer from the same problems as rural areas in the sense that a majority of the workforce still depends on clinics for healthcare. They don’t necessarily have the means to afford a family doctor or have access to one, for example. By integrating Dr MacQ healthcare services with on-site clinics using virtual kiosks, companies quickly see the value in keeping staff healthy through easy access to proper healthcare which in return increases workplace efficiency.

At the same time that Dr MacQ started implementing telemedicine solutions for city-based companies, they also began developing a system working with pharmacies in order to realise their aim of providing trusted telemedicine to all. The system allows patients to visit any partnered pharmacy and have a consultation at a virtual kiosk with any of the Dr MacQ on-call doctors. The pharmacies are able to do basic diagnostics like taking blood pressure and temperature. This helps the doctors to diagnose patients during the private online consultations. If the patients need a prescription, the doctor can immediately send it to the pharmacist who is able to fill it out right there and then. Currently, Dr MacQ is available in Windhoek at Langerhans Pharmacy, Medisun Apteek, Windhoek Pharmacy and Bergdoring Pharmacy, and in Swakopmund at Central Pharmacy.

With plans to increase the number of pharmacies providing online consultations and continuously finding new ways to improve their services, Dr MacQ is fulfilling the vision of its founder Dr Azadeh by bringing quality healthcare within reach through making it affordable and more accessible.

To find out more visit www.drmacq.com