The Severe Global Shortage of Doctors and Health Workers

In the United States and Canada, you’ll find, on average, 2.5 physicians per 1000 people, while most Western European countries boast 3, 4, or even 5 physicians for the same population. By contrast, many African countries have less than 1 physician per 10,000 population members. If those statistics seem uneven, it’s because they are. And they only get worse. The World Health Organization reports that Africa “suffers more than 24% of the global burden of disease, but has access to only 3% of health workers and less than 1% of the world’s financial resources.”

Developing countries often lack the healthcare systems that are in place in the US, Canada, and Europe, with many people living in remote areas without the means to travel to the nearest hospital or clinic, or the finances to access them. And while studies show that foreign aid for healthcare in developing countries increases life expectancy and decreases infant mortality, government budgets for international aid are decreasing. In order to fill that gap, the responsibility often falls to philanthropic foundations.

That’s what makes WELL’s social mission to “do good by doing well” so vital. WELL has established itself as the world’s first decentralized global marketplace for high quality health care. With an aim to globalize healthcare, eliminate country borders, and connect doctors to patients worldwide, it has developed an effective structure to do so through global telemedicine. That means patients can use the WELL platform to see doctors remotely, in all parts of the world. And with that structure already in place, WELL has built a charity initiative that donates to healthcare nonprofits and trains physicians in developing countries each time a WELL visit is bought.

How does it work? For each WELL visit bought through our platform, WELL makes a donation to one of its nonprofit partners covering the same number of visits. It also works to train doctors in telemedicine, expanding its network to areas without proper access to physicians. Those visits benefit patients in developing countries, allowing WELL to help close the healthcare gap, and allowing WELL’s platform users to do good by doing WELL.

Join our Telegram group to stay tuned!