Healthcare at your doorstep

KATHMANDU, Sept 8: If you’ve ever dreamt of receiving healthcare services at your home, and that too at an affordable price, you can see your dreams coming true. You don’t have to worry if your beloved ones who are suffering from chronic illnesses are bedridden, and you need to seek frequent healthcare facilities for them.[break]



Claiming to be the first of its kind in the whole South Asia, Health at Home is here to cater to the needs of those who desire healthcare facilities to be delivered at their doorsteps.



“We’ve established Health at Home with an objective to provide out-of-hospital services,” shares Dr Bishal Dhakal, the person behind the “revolutionary” thought.



According to him, patients are generally left in the lurch by the attending hospitals once the former gets discharged. After leaving hospitals, patients have to encounter multiple health problems while recuperating, and they can’t rush to the hospitals every time.



“Responsibility of medical professional doesn’t end by providing treatment to the patients at hospitals. It is equally important that patients be monitored at regular intervals at their home,” continues Dr Dhakal.



Health at Home provides two kinds of facilities – subscriber-based and on-call. The subscriber-base facility includes maintaining patients’ medical history to delivering monthly prescription drugs and medical professionals’ monthly visit to yearly health checkups.



And in the on-call facility, medical doctors sent by Health at Home attend all cases (except emergency) as per the patients’ requests. Dr Dhakal claims that the on-call facility is cheaper than those of the hospitals’, and that is why it is gaining momentum.



He says, “This facility is like having a doctor (someone from family members) at your home. Since the inception of this facility one year ago, it has proved instrumental to patients suffering from paralysis, stroke and Parkinson’s disease.”



Health at Home has plans to expand its infrastructures and human resources so that it would be a lot easier for people to gain access to healthcare facilities.



Senior pathologist Dr Ishwar Lal Shrestha said such a kind of services has already been proven useful in western as well as Asian countries, and that establishment of Health at Home in Nepal is a positive step to providing healthcare services inside one’s own home.



“The priorities of healthcare providers must be to serve needy patients,” says Shrestha.

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