The one weak thread through all of this (earthquake relief) has been project management or the lack of it, simply due to the enormity of the task at hand. As a community that specializes in automating and improving the processes involved in running businesses and government, it would be a shame if we could not help streamline the relief activities and make them more effective.
P@SHA has therefore offered its assistance to the PM’s Secretariat and Relief Cell. We are putting together a team of experts who will analyze the needs of the relief organizations
including the government, the army and the NGOs etc and will link it all up to provide some sort of cohesive approach to the activities thus saving a lot of time and increasing the pace of relief activities.
In the process we will need expertise of varying types:
Hardware Installation & Maintenance
Networking
Wireless Communication Installation, Deployment &
Maintenance
System Analysts
Project Managers
ASP.NET/HTML developers
PHP developers
Java developers
SQL servers developers
mySQL developers
Graphic/Interface designers
Data Entry people
People for Information Gathering
Content creation/development/management specialists
Communication specialists able to deal with
telecom/satellite equipment
Some of the volunteers may be required to work in their respective cities, others may be asked to work in Islamabad or at the relief sites in the northern areas. Please do therefore
specify where you are stationed and whether you will be available or able to relocate to any of the sites if necessary and for what period of time.
P@SHA will be working with various IT and telecom organizations. Some of them including Intel have already volunteered equipment and connectivity. We are also working with Shahida Saleem and Azhar Rizvi on implementing telemedicine in the affected areas.
Please indicate your interest or those of your employees by sending an email to volunteers@pasha.org.pk. I would appreciate it if you would circulate this email to your team.
Please circulate this email to anyone that you feel would be able to assist.
Jehan Ara
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Mr. Taha, an ex-alumni of NUST University in Islamabad has just called me to update on an existence of Patient Management System currently developed, deployed and managed by the employees of Micronet DSL ISP of Islamabad at PIMS (Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences). I have to check with them if they could lend that application to the other hospitals and field hospitals which would be great. But on a longer-term, I would say a shared and common database of all hospitals to have records of every patient checking in and out of the hospital with his/her address… let’s see after I get the update.
Right now, there are hundreds of patients lying in every hospitals and more and more patients coming in Rawalpindi, Islamabad as the weather worsens in northern areas and they are being shifted to the capital. But the existing patients who can be discharged can not be discharged because there’s no place to go…
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Have been constantly trying to get in touch with organizations and teams to move in to the un-attended and untouched areas but the situation isn’t as easy as it sounds. You need to have good enough funds and security, knowledge of the area, weather conditions and very importantly the psychological condition of the victims. It was only few days ago when someone at blogistan discussed the psychological and emotional treatment and support which would constantly be required. The kids and females after have been traumatized by the earth quake have still not recovered. Special psychiatry wards have been setup, one of which I visited too. These patients do sometimes recover soon but they still feel every moment to be the moment of earth quake.
Growing no. of patients are reaching Pindi’s existing and field hospitals which not just include the victims but the rescue teams including army and others. While the media may not have portrayed that part of the story, I have seen and known some serious injuries inflicted upon the officers and jawans (soldiers) of armed forces during rescue operation. I have personally seen an officer with his ribs broken, lungs collapsed and blunt trauma of abdomen during a rescue operation near Bagh. 21 KM long traffic blockade and increasing impatience and agitated behavior of the victims has forced the traffic not to move after 5-6 in evening and yet created hindrance for many people who wanted to go there and work as volunteer on their own, not to mention the increasingly severe weather conditions.
After visiting Race Course, RWP/ISL and meeting couple of Army offrs. who’re managing the relief camps, I got to know there are 1500 sorties have already been made which is sort of crazy esp. with the fact that each helicopter needs an overhauling of 3 weeks after flight hours of 100. I have seen helicopters making rescue and relief flights at 9′0 clock in the night without Night Navigation facilities which is even scarier. And as some of you may know the night falls here more quickly than in Karachi from where I am coming.
The no. of patients who get recovered can’t go anywhere and doctors don’t know where to send them, hence they are becoming an additional toll on the HR and management of the hospital, not to forget the monetary additions. In such visits, I met a psycho-therapist Dr. Kamran who couldn’t place us anywhere because of our lack of no-medical skills whatsoever but however he showed his concern and eagerness if a simple patients records management application for his hospital. And at that moment, I was like what? Why hadn’t anyone else thought of that before? And why else the IT companies thought of that before? Anyhow, talked to my college fellow and junior, Amer Mukhtar, who’s in Lahore these days about that and after few hours, he’s set up and probably already working to improve upon the application. I really want it to be Online and browser-based so that it can be adopted by any no. of hospitals. The demo has already been set up at http://www.efortsol.com anyone willing to improve upon it may do so by calling 03005105818 (Amer Mukhtar, Lahore) or 03002627033 (myself, RWP). The message has been forwarded to the PASHA (Pakistan’s software House Association) hopefully and let’s see how things move… Meanwhile do check out http://quakehelp.blogspot.com/ guys. Brilliant job by these people. But I wish if the local people had long stepped forward to assist relief teams with Information Technology or computing. I don’t know but I just feel very very awkward at this. Anyways, checkout the increasing no. of maps as reported by Quakehelp and contribute as much as you can….
more updates later…
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