Volunteer doctors to continue prescribing hope in 2010

ÜHDER is a comprehensive vocational association for healthcare workers -- including doctors and dentists, pharmacists and others -- whose activities include get-togethers, day trips and other outings for medical professionals that create a sense of professional solidarity. “This is a very new idea in Turkey, taking medical workers out of the stress of their everyday life and allowing them to spend time with their families along with their colleagues and colleagues’ families. As everyone unwinds, they become more productive and it’s easier for them to share experiences and generate new ideas,” ÜHDER President Dr. Lütfi Ruhioğlu said.

Among the fruits of this process has been the awakening to the social responsibility that rests upon medical professionals -- outside of their own practices and patients and family. “This awareness was actually put into action before our association was founded,” Ruhioğlu explained. “As a group of doctors we began participating in aid work as far back as 1997-8, getting together in response to domestic natural disasters. Where we saw others going to the region and writing prescriptions in earthquake zones, we addressed the root of the problem -- we enlisted the aid of pharmacists and medical suppliers, bringing necessary medicines, setting up camp and distributing food and clothing,” he said.

As time went by, this loose association of doctors wanted to expand their charitable work beyond Turkey’s borders -- beginning with Tanzania. “Tanzania seemed to us a place with so much poverty, so much need, and so we wanted to go there,” explains ÜHDER Coordinator Metin Topkaraoğlu. However as the group was not official, they received no response time and time again. Eventually, the group of doctors decided to found an official association, in 2007 becoming the Hope Physicians Association -- named for their hopes that this move would enable them to do more work for the common good. In Turkish, the word “hekimler,” here translated as physicians, encompasses both doctors and pharmacists. “With an official association name, with business cards and an official body, we became much more effective, and were able to wield more influence,” Ruhioğlu said.

Spreading hope through volunteerism, self-sacrifice

The essence of the work of ÜHDER is volunteerism. Noting the self-sacrifice that the men and women medical volunteers willingly undertake as part of the charity campaigns ÜHDER organizes, Topkaraoğlu emphasized: “These doctors are mothers and fathers -- to begin with, it’s a great sacrifice to leave their families behind for weeks to take part in these activities. In addition to that, they also leave their practices and their own patients behind in Turkey, which means taking an important financial loss.”

ÜHDER’s foreign successes in 2009 included the successful medical screenings of thousands upon thousands of people in Afghanistan and Ethiopia, accomplished with the collaboration and financial support of TİKA and the Kimse Yok Mu association. The teams of volunteer doctors ÜHDER dispatches abroad include ENT doctors, pediatricians, gynecologists, surgeons, child psychologists, dentists, pharmacists, radiologists and oncologists. In one area of Ethiopia the doctors went to, it was the first time the region had ever seen a dentist.

In the year ahead, ÜHDER hopes to replicate the success of its health screening campaigns abroad and add increased functionality to its projects. “Our goal here is, as they say, to teach people how to fish instead of just giving them fish. We learned through our experiences that our doctors have a great deal of experience they can share with their counterparts in Afghanistan and Ethiopia,” Topkaraoğlu said. He explained that they have plans to implement a rotational system where Turkish doctors volunteer back-to-back to spend their annual vacation time abroad teaching new techniques to local physicians. If a group of five doctors in the same field, for example, each spend a month in Ethiopia training local doctors in new techniques and technologies, “that’s five invaluable months of experience and knowledge transfer, of tremendous value.”

The members of ÜHDER also have ambitions to build a modern new hospital abroad, and also to work with Ethiopian and Afghan medical students studying in Turkey so that they can eventually fill the training and educational roles that volunteer Turkish doctors are currently performing. “With the experience that we’ve gained through this year’s health screenings and projects abroad, we know now what it is exactly that is necessary -- in 2010 our job will be easier because of what we’ve learned, and we’ll be more effective,” Ruhioğlu explained.