Leveraging Existing Resources with Technology to Solve Africa's Emergency Response Problem

Growing up in Nigeria, I was always fearful. Part of that fear was due to this lingering feeling that I was one emergency, mishap, or accident away from losing my life or losing someone I love. I’ll admit that some of it was irrational but a huge part of that fear was justified. I read about stories and observed incidences where people, Nigerians, couldn’t access care in emergencies. Sometimes it was a case of people being unable to get care at the scene of the accidents and the lack of access to ambulances. Or if they got to the hospital by the kindness of bystanders, hospitals didn’t have the capacity to deliver emergency care. Or when the hospital did have that capacity, they refused to deliver care until the patient paid. This dysfunctional sequence of events is what we’d ordinarily call the emergency care system. The World Health Assembly resolution 72.16 defines an emergency care system as “an integrated platform for delivering accessible, quality, time-sensitive health care services for acute illness and injury across the life course”. But as we can see, what exists in Nigeria and in many parts of Africa is not much of a system.

As of 2016, Africa was the continent with the highest rate of road traffic deaths with 26.6 deaths per 100,000, compared to 18.2 worldwide. What’s worse is that the death rate from road traffic accidents in SSA is expected to be 72% higher than the global average by 2030. We see similar trends in other causes of death that can be limited by emergency care like ischemic heart disease, stroke, and preterm birth complications.

There are several pieces that come together to form an emergency care system and we’ll get to all those pieces in future episodes. But today, we’ll start with the pre-hospital piece, which is how patients are treated on the scene of the accident and transported to health facilities. I speak to Folake Owodunni, the CEO and co-founder of Emergency Response Africa (ERA).