User:JHehner
Hi folks...
My name is Josh Hehner, I'm a Paramedic working in Toronto, Canada, and am Director of Community Medicine Programs for a Peruvian-Canadian charity called Para el Mundo (PaM). We work in northern Peru in the areas of community medicine, education and social services.
We work closely with the Peruvian Ministry of Health (MINSA), and have many contacts there.
I was moved to become involved after thinking about the OLPC project, its implications for children and the lowering of barriers to access to education and the means of information processing, and finally their application to the work that we have been doing. For a long time I have had an interest in the applications of portable computing and new media to pre-hospital emergency medicine, having written a paper in 2001 during my paramedic program about point-of-contact informatics, researching the future of the emerging adaptation of those tools to facilitate our job.
In 2005, my wife and I moved to a small town in northern Peru and helped form a community development organization that has created the town's first free medical program and medical clinics visiting more remote and isolated peasant communities in the area. I work as Director of Community Medicine.
The medical program is among a variety of community projects we have initiated in the areas of education and social services. We work with the schools in our town, both primary and secondary, in strengthening teaching capacity, particularly having been deeply involved in areas of sexual health education, english, math & computers. I hope to find out if and how our province might be participating in Peru's involvement in OLPC.
A "One Laptop Per Doctor" that I imagine would be ideal technological support for the model that I have been developing. It is one which uses the Paramedic's model of one (or more) base-hospital physicians whose reach is extended out into the community through protocols, delegated acts, training and continuing medical education. This is combined, in our Peruvian context, with the "Health Promoters" model of community health workers, of less formal training where institutional support is unavailable, of home-visits and 'healthy community' models.
This could obviously be facilitated enormously by the distance medicine revolution that is just on the horizon. An OLPD device could assist in so many vital ways, ones which I imagine you have already or can envision without having to be in the medical field. (Some examples that I dream of are data entry + gps tagging; video-conferencing to docs back in the city for consultations or even providing instruction to nurses,paramedics or health workers; telemetry; images & a/v for patient education; maybe translation for patient interactions, etc..., etc...).
I can be contacted via e-mail at josh at paraelmundo dot org
