doctHERs

Area of Focus:

Digital Health

Geography:

Pakistan

In Pakistan, 80 percent of medical school graduates are women, yet only 25 percent of these women go on to practise medicine due to socio-cultural barriers resulting in 80,000+ licensed female physicians excluded from the workforce. An additional market failure means that in a country of 230 million, 80 percent of the population lacks access to quality healthcare, especially women and girls.

Women in rural areas especially lack agency in matters of their own health. This is due to mobility challenges, limitations in accessing care without male relatives, restrictions on consulting male physicians in the absence of female healthcare providers and financial dependency. The level of women's health in Pakistan is among the lowest in the world and this can be seen in high maternal, infant and child mortality rates which are among the worst in the region.

doctHERs is a holistic, hybrid healthcare company that reintegrates female healthcare providers into an agile, gender-inclusive workforce and promotes health equity using mobile health and intermediary-assisted telemedicine.

TRANSFORM helped doctHERs train, equip and deploy female frontline health workers to deliver health awareness activities to women and girls in villages and to connect these communities to remote female doctors via telemedicine. The programme leveraged the widespread reach of Unilever's rural retail programme, Mera Sona Gaon.

TRANSFORM further supported doctHERs to launch the world’s first rural tele-pharmacy model where Guddi Bajis (frontline health workers) provided access to doctors and pharmacists in their villages whilst operating as last-mile retailers of health and hygiene products for Unilever, and served as village pharmacy access points.