Towards a better world | Working with the World Health Organization (WHO)

The first step towards success is self assessment. Self assessment often teaches a person how privileged he/she really, specially when you walk out in the real world have a look through your own eyes. Only the eyes that have the ability to actually judge what really is going on out there. Thousands of children don't have access to basic human necessities such as clean water, electricity, liberty to enjoy their childhood etc

Living as an above middle class in a third world country makes you realise the privilege you have. What really matters is how much you're giving back to the society. The society that lacks behind due to negligence of the Government of this country. The financial and societal imbalance between the rich and the poor has further dragged down the standard of living over here.

Being a graduate from a Government Medical University, I know what sort of troubles an average lower class person has to go through. To get an appointment with a doctor you'll have to wait for weeks or even months if you don't have any contacts within the hospital. Karachi, being the largest and the most populated city of Pakistan, attracts hundreds and thousands of underprivileged people from all over the country. Majority of these people come from villages where they lack a lot of things. For instance there are absolutely no hospitals in rural areas so they have to pack their bags, carry their patients and travel to bigger cities, one of them being Karachi.

As a dentist, I promise myself every day that I'll try to end the misery of atleast one patient that I encounter. It's the least I can do. How, you might ask? By not forcing them to wait hours and hours just because 'I'm not in the mood' of treating anyone at the moment. By easing their troubles etc. But this limits me to a single patient, and I need to do something on a mass level.

For this, we came up with the idea of Dental Camps. A free of cost dental check-up for everyone. This helped a lot of underprivileged people who couldn't afford to pay the hefty fees of dental check-ups. Almost every month or two, we organize a dental camp at different locations in Karachi. Be it a school, an orphanage, a police station or am elderly home.

My sister in law is studying Public Health in thr Aga Khan University. AKU is rated under top 200 universities in the Public Health and epidemiology sector. The good thing about AKU is that it is affiliated with the World Health Organization (WHO) works with this organization. My sister in law, being a part of this organization decided to organize multiple camps in different government schools of Karachi. Before moving on let me brief you about what WHO really is:

_WHO

The first dental camp, regarding which I'll be talking about in this post, was organized in an area called Johar Block 12. We got in touch with the principal of the school beforehand and had gotten everything in order for the camp.

Our team comprised of 10 dentists and the duties were:

• General dental checkup of all the students upto grade 5

• General dental checkup of teachers who are willing to get their assessment

• Awareness session about oral hygiene

• Focused discussion sessions with the parents of these children.

Everything had to be in order. Since we were working with the WHO, we were given the diagnostic forms and the consent forms from them only:

The session started with setting up the OPDs where our dentists wer stationed. The teachers were informed to send in the kids according to their classes, starting with the youngest. The children were already given the consent form a couple of days prior to this camp which needed to be signed by their parents. I cannot post the consent forms as they contain private information. Those kids who didn't get it signed were not allowed for a check-up.

I appreciate how well mannered and well organized my team was that day. Everything was done in an order. Everything was noted down on the forms. Kids who needed to get their scaling, kids who required extraction, those who required Root Canal therapy, everything was mentioned in the form and their parents were summoned the next day for a detailed focussed session.

After the OPD session, the kids were directed towards the giveaway section where they were handed out free mouth washes and toothpastes.

It took us more than 2 hours to cater to all 100 students. After the diagnosis and the giveaway the students were brought together to have a group photo. They were all very excited

Honestly doing these sort of things bring me real joy. I might not be able to put my actual feelings in words as English is not my mother tongue, bu these dental camps amongst children give me a sense of satisfaction and happiness. The very thought of being helpful to children who don't have a lot of people to speak for them, it gives me joy to atleast doing thr least I can

It's 1 am in the morning here and I have to visit another school at 9 am tomorrow for another camp. I'll end this post now, hope you had a good read.
Regards,
@huzaifanaveed1