What if your help isn’t really helping?
Many third world countries lack reliable access to medical treatment, and plenty of organizations want to step in. When Healthcare Hurts describes the sobering consequences of a well-meaning but poorly executed desire to assist. Rescuing people through foreign aid can actually create a dependence mentality, leading recipients to think they can't solve their problems without external help. Visiting clinics also take away opportunities from local medical facilities. In the most extreme cases, temporary clinics become overwhelmed with patients, leading to medication errors and deaths. Seager then discusses best practices for medical trips to avert these situations. This starts with collaborating with local practitioners to learn what the true needs are, then empowering them to figure out their own solutions. By doing so, they can eventually become self-sustaining.
Takeaways:
Emphasize quality over quantity. Compassionate people struggle to turn away problems they may not be capable of resolving. Their desire to help carries over to every challenge they encounter, even if they have exhausted their energy and resources. Everyone likes emphasizing numbers. Seeing five hundred patients in three days can sound like bragging, if we're not careful. Problem is, how much can you do in a few days? Overcoming long-term problems involves a more extensive time commitment. When I served in Haiti, some of the situations we left our patients in concerned me. As a pharmacist, seeing more patients meant having less time to verify that each one understood proper medication use. Extenuating factors such as language barrier and low literacy rate increased the chance of errors. Plus, they had no way to properly store antibiotics requiring refrigeration, which leads to relapse in therapy and drug resistance.
Start by slowing down. You have to begin by observing. People tend to skip this step, or they don't spend enough time on it. The situations you engage tend to be complex and lack a straightforward solution. As seen from the visitor clinics undermining opportunities for local clinics to do business, helping in one area may damage another. As much as we take satisfaction in making a visible difference, the most lasting impact comes from the insights gained by the people serving. The experience leads them to evaluate how to best help in difficult situations. The clinic I served in might have built some relationships and temporarily alleviated some symptoms, but the patients still need a strategy for ongoing health challenges, such as diabetes.
Provide resourcefulness over resources. If we simply supply what's needed, recipients don't learn to acquire resources on their own, and they settle for feeling helpless. The most common question a Haitian asks a foreigner is, "What are you here to give me?" To facilitate change, build on the strengths a community currently has, not the problems stemming from what they lack.
Seager presents a tough but necessary case on the dangers of charity. Noble intentions don't compensate for incompetent actions. If you encounter a trip with a "hero's mentality," take time to ask yourself how to truly help someone else. You don't have to agree with what Seager says, but you will find his stance helpful nonetheless.
