'Money or Blood'

What type of medicine do poor countries deserve?

The Swiss paediatrician and musician Beat Richner came to Cambodia in 1975 for a practical course when he was still a young physician. Since 1991 he has set up three children's hospitals, Kantha Bopha I and II in Phnom Penh and Jayavarmann VII in Siem Reap, in a country that had been devastated during twenty years of war and by the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, which had left Cambodia in a state of extreme poverty with 95 per cent of families unable to afford child health care.

The situation today

In the past 10 years, three hospitals and a maternity ward for HIV positive mothers were built and are fully operating. The Kantha Bopha Children's Hospital has been progressively extended and modified to meet the most urgent needs.
In the three hospitals, Kantha Bopha I and II in Phnom Penh and Jayavarman VII in Siem Reap Angkor, each year approximately 50,000 children are hospitalized (the average length of hospitalisation is 5 days), 600,000 ill children receive treatment in the outpatients' department, 400,000 healthy children get vaccinated, 10,000 operations are carried out, and daily 3,000 families receive health care education. All medical services are free of charge since the families in Cambodia are simply too poor to even make a small contribution towards these medical costs. Without Kantha Bopha, 3,200 additional children would die in Cambodia every month.
In the maternity ward HIV positive mothers are treated and deliver their babies. A lot of the 450 children that are born here every month can be protected against an infection with the virus by already treating them in the womb.
Beat Richner not only fights for the lives of children, but also against the corruption in the state public health sector of Cambodia by making medical care freely available to all children and by paying local staff a decent living wage. The expenses of annually $15 million are financed by donations, which partly result from cello-concerts given by the paediatrician under the name 'Beatocello': 'The young tourists shall donate blood, the older tourists money. 'Money or Blood', that is the motto of my concerts.'
Through his many years of work in Cambodia Dr Richner has become a powerfully eloquent critic of the model of 'primary health care', propagated by WHO and UNICEF for Cambodia and other developing countries. 'Is the life of a Cambodian child worth less than that of a child from the Western World?' Richner asks and protests that the physician turns into a murderer if for reasons of 'cost-efficiency' he prescribes a medication in a developing country that has been banned in Europe for thirty years because of its side-effects; or if he administers stored blood that has not been tested for deadly AIDS- or hepatitis viruses.

No bureaucracy

A mere 5% of the hospital's funds are spent on administrative tasks. In order to avoid the traditional, cost-intensive hospital management and the bureaucracy going with it, those tasks which can be dealt with locally, including logistics, have been allocated to those members of the medical staff who have the necessary administrative skills. This means that the money will be spent fully for the benefit of the children in need and the Cambodian population. What's more, it has been possible to reduce the number of foreign staff to just four. Today, Kantha Bopha is operating largely autonomously, both from a professional as well as a technical viewpoint.
In the year 2000, an international team of experts was sent to Cambodia by order of the Swiss Federal Agency for Development and Cooperation (DEZA) to evaluate the hospitals. The result was: Kantha Bopha was rated as a prime example of a project for the Third World. After a personal inspection of the three hospitals, the director of DEZA fully acknowledged the final result of the experts: 'Care of patients, organization and hygiene are excellent. Kantha Bopha has optimal cost effectiveness'.
Therefore, the necessary funds for the hospitals are appropriately spent. 95% of the funds are spent in Cambodia - for medication, for the salaries of over 1,100 employees and for the maintenance and running costs of the hospitals. Only 5% of the total funds are necessary to run the infrastructure of the foundation in Switzerland. Thus, the people and children of Cambodia are fully profiting from any donations.
Every single donation helps to prevent, to treat and to cure illnesses.

http://www.beat-richner.ch/Assets/richner_present.html