For All! Archana is working for a better world

This is Archana Kumar. She’s a doctor in Lucknor, India. She’s worked as a paediatrician at the city’s Medical University for 24 years, and her commitment to her job remains as strong as it’s ever been. “I’m the only cancer specialist here,” she explains, “so even when I’m on holiday, I have to come in and help my patients. My dream is for the very best care to be given to poor people.”

It’s a dream she’s gone to great lengths to turn into a reality. Though support from the Indian government has increased recently, huge numbers of people still can’t afford medical care in the country. Unwilling to accept this or wait for change, Archana has devised a novel solution.

“I decided to try to get a number of people to donate drugs to us, and to ‘adopt’ patients and pay for their medical costs,” she says. “Many people came forward to help, and it was possible for me to treat the children of a very poor rickshaw puller and a manual labourer. Cancer treatment is expensive and can be drawn out over a period of years, but no child should die because the resources are not available. This is what made me do all of this, and I think we are having success, too. We are getting help from a lot of people.”

There are many challenges, however, that even Archana is unable to overcome. “We have just one nurse exclusively devoted to the paediatric cancer unit,” she says, “and we share our nursing staff with the neo-natal intensive care unit, which has just five nurses. But I have 25 patients on this ward, and the intensive care unit handles about 30 to 40 patients per day. You can imagine the problem. We need about four or five times the nurses we have.”

But there is much that still needs to change. “I think the government should be helping us with cancer drugs, which currently it is not able to do,” she says. “It has subsidised many things, and does help with maintenance costs and new machines, but this is really not adequate. We are trying to earn revenues from the hospital. We charge a small amount of money for the use of specialist machines so we can afford to keep them running.”

“The hospital has a 16-bed ward for cancer,” she continues. “This is always occupied – we usually have around 150 per cent occupancy. On chemotherapy days, 50 additional patients come in who are being cared for monthly or weekly. They are all crammed into the 16 beds. This is not adequate for a cancer ward. There are often two or three patients to a bed.”

It’s not all bad news. Archana’s ward was recently renovated, and a new paediatric intensive care unit has been opened at the hospital. The neo-natal unit has been expanded, training standards are improving, and it’s now easier for Archana to work alongside other departments, meaning that patients can get a better quality of long-term care.

Concerns about staffing levels, access to medicines, and funding are never far away, but Archana remains hopeful. She dreams that one day “an absolutely state-of-the-art paediatric centre” will be built in the Uttar Pradesh region, with “sub-centres throughout the state so paediatric cancer patients can be taken care of in a very comprehensive way”. It might seem like a pipedream today, but with Archana and others like her fighting for change, nothing is impossible.

One person can make a big difference.
Imagine what six million could do.