Pakistan has a population of around 240 million people, and it’s growing fast. “It’s the fifth largest country in the world,” explains Dr. Sara Saeed. “To cater for that we have 240,000 doctors … that’s around one doctor for every thousand patients.”
Of Pakistan’s medical students, Saeed explains, 80 per cent are women—but only 23 per cent of them ever make it into the workforce. “By the time a female doctor graduates and becomes a doctor, and she starts practising, that’s when the social and cultural barriers kick in. You either get married and have children or you’re not allowed to work. The term for these doctors is a ‘doctor bride.’”
In this episode of Planet Pioneers, a new video series in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, Saeed sits down with WIRED’s Greg Williams to talk about her solution: Sehat Kahani, a telemedicine startup which connects medical professionals across Pakistan with patients needing remote care.
Saeed has seen the challenges for Pakistan’s women doctors personally. After medical school, Saeed was undertaking a radiology residency but had to quit when she became pregnant. “To kill time, I started doing a primary care clinic in a slum,” Saeed says. “I saw how a doctor that is in the community can really impact the patients around them.” After Saeed’s child was born, the clinic called her, asking where the doctor had gone. Saeed realised that there was a solution: remote appointments. “Pakistan has two problems: female doctors not working and patients not getting doctors—just connect them through the bridge of technology.”
In 2017, Saeed and her co-founder Dr. Iffat Zafar started Sehat Kahani. To date, more than 7,000 healthcare professionals have signed up to offer their services through the app; together they have performed more than 2.5 million consultations and have 1.5 million people on its application and web platform, treating communicable diseases like pneumonia, diagnosing cancers, and helping patients with sensitive issues such as infertility and physical and mental abuse—all of which is done remotely. Many of their patients, especially women, have never seen a doctor before.
In 2019, Saeed was awarded a Rolex Award for Enterprise for her help in supporting and highlighting Sehat Kahani’s work in providing healthcare, but also for shifting cultural barriers around women in medicine. “We were able to use the funding support to create an online learning management system,” Saeed says. “But on a broader perspective … having that credibility of being [a Rolex Awards] Associate Laureate helped with my credibility as a female founder, [and] it gave me a global platform to talk about Sehat Kahani.”
To find out more about Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative, visit rolex.org, and explore our Planet Pioneers partnership page here.
