By Jennifer Farrell | Founder & Executive Director
It has been an exciting start to 2016 for CriticaLink as we work toward expanding our work in Bangladesh and building international partnerships that allow us to move toward our goal of creating a global model for rapid emergency medical care.
In February and March, CriticaLink Founder Jennifer Farrell and Program Director Rahat Hossain, along with one of our app mobile developers, Zayed Rahman, went to Cape Town, South Africa for six weeks to work with Emergency First Aid Responders (EFAR), a South African-based non-profit that works with community first responders in the Western Cape. Founded over 8 years ago, EFAR is working in over 30 communities in the Western Cape and has over 3000 volunteer First Responders in urban and rural communities.
The goal of this trip was to help develop a new version of the CriticaLink app that could be used by EFAR volunteers and connect these 3000 volunteers with the Ministry of Health emergency response system to get more rapid response to emergency victims in the Western Cape. We also hoped to learn a lot about how to grow our organization to work in more diverse communities within Bangladesh, and hopefully outside.
The trip was a great success! We spent a lot of time with the many of the community-based organizations with First Responders throughout the Western Cape, talked with their volunteers and team leaders, attended their First Responder Training Sessions, and exchanged ideas about how to grow our volunteer base, keep volunteers engaged, and ensure quality of training.
In addition to spending time with South African First Responders, we also spent some time with the dispatchers at the Western Cape government emergency dispatch center. They shared some of the challenges of responding to thousands of calls a day (a lot more than we are getting in Bangladesh right now!), and how they manage to handle calls coming from people speaking over 10 different languages. Getting an understanding of their dispatch system also helped us think about some design changes for our own system, and how we might better fit our app into the South African system to help them utilize the thousands of volunteer First Responders working with EFAR.
Finally, Rahat and Jennifer had the amazing opportunity to go out into the field with paramedics on the government ambulances and respond to real emergencies during some very intense night shifts in Cape Town. During these ride-alongs, we talked with the paramedics about the challenges of using radio and paper, and how mobile devices might help improve their response. We learned about the difficulties they face, how they see technology fitting into their response, and discussed a lot about how our community First Responders might play an important support role for these paramedics.
Overall the trip was a great success, and we came away with a lot of new ideas for our own volunteers and a VERY exciting new version of the CriticaLink mobile app that we will launch very shortly in Bangladesh and with the EFAR organization in South Africa. We hope that this partnership will provide a great global exchange to help us develop our own volunteers to the next level, but also to push our mobile app to a place where it can be implemented and used by organizations and governments all over the world to help get faster care to people everywhere.
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