Career or family? This is the never-ending dilemma for women doctors in Pakistan, a country where more than 80 per cent of medical students are female, yet just 40 percent of them practice after getting married. Dr. Iffat Zafar and Dr. Sara Saeed Khurram have worked to address this issue by driving systems-level changes through their women-led telemedicine solution, Sehat Kahani.
Dr. Saeed can identify the exact moment when her career path was chosen. “I was five years old when my father told me I was going to be a doctor. I was never offered a choice and I did not understand until it became my time to look for a husband”.
In Pakistan, becoming a doctor raises the social status of women and gives them the best hand in marriage, but this is followed by the expectation that they discontinue working after marriage. With a population of 20 million people, Pakistan has a total medical workforce of nearly 250,000 certified doctors, and a doctor-to-patient ratio of one per 1,000.
In 2017, Dr. Saeed and Dr. Zafar founded Sehat Kahani, a for-profit organization with an online platform in a bid to address the pre-existing disparities in healthcare delivery, while also enabling women to continue practicing medicine. The telemedicine solution combines technology and comprehensive health services to help reach remote and rural areas of Pakistan where pre existing medical facilities exist, but often without the necessary doctors to run them. Dr. Zafar and Dr. Saeed established assisted e-clinics to give urban users a chance to access affordable quality healthcare using a mobile application. This app is used by individual consumers as well as corporations for employee health and wellbeing. The platform has become the first-ever predominantly female health provider network in the country, and allows patients access to doctors, particularly women and children from remote locations.
“Our vision was to create this healthcare super app, so that patient’s primary health care issues could be solved within the application, regardless of whether they live in a rural village or a city. We want to establish minimum quality of care as a right for every individual in the country” says Dr. Sara Saeed.
The platform became a working reality after its success during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was effective in helping to strengthen communication in the healthcare system, while also improving treatment for patients who had little to no access to medical resources. Already, the platform has provided 5,000 additional healthcare staff, a majority 90 percent of whom are women, to directly support more than 1.3 million consultations across Pakistan.
“My vision is that in five years time, we will have at least 50,000 doctors on our platform from within Pakistan and further afield. We want to create that safe space for other women so that they can advance within the medical profession” says Dr. Zafar.
Beyond clinical work, Sehat Kahani is working to strengthen the resiliency of women’s empowerment across the country, whether through capacity building, mental wellness counseling, or advocating for a democratized healthcare system in Pakistan.
Dr. Zafar’s hope for women leaders is that they have the confidence to believe in themselves and aim high in their professional aspirations. “Young women need to believe in themselves and aim for the sky. I think women leaders are really strong and resilient. What they need is the support of their community and the belief that they can do it.”
