Kindness in Action: A Teen Changemakers Attempt to Revolutionize the Healthcare Ecosystem!

Simra Faisal, a 17-year-old, XIIth grade student of The Shri Ram School, Aravali, Gurgaon founded Project Kea. Following the philosophy of ‘Kintsugi’, Kea, a healthcare portal, was created to resolve the imperfections within India’s nursing system. It focuses on the humble cause of finding nurses and medical attendants that suit the needs of the patients and their families, free of cost. All the nurses in the Kea database have had their nursing certificate of registration verified by Kea so that this burden does not fall upon the patient families, especially during times of excessive emotional turmoil.

There is a huge shortage of nurses (4 million according to The Hindu Business Line) and medical attendants in our country. To top that, the quality of graduating nurses is poor as there is not enough practical training; and there are not enough nursing schools. Simra started an online petition raising an awareness for the same. She plans to take this forward to the Ministry of Health once she gets enough support. The petition has reached 100 signatures. She even held a fundraiser which has reached rupees 31,460 and graciously planned to use this amount to provide a patient attendant to a member of the marginalized community.

Simra has also initiated a project where she onboarded 12 women between the ages of 18-25 in a Delhi slum and has trained them as medical attendants under the guidance of a certified nursing practitioner, to further Project Kea’s motive and generate employment. At the end of the workshop series, all the 12 women trainees were given certificates outlining the skill development training; and the trained women now are confident to enter the workforce as medical attendants. The end goal is to support the marginalized section of our society, to develop skills to provide them employment, and in return will contribute not only to their community but fill a larger void for the greater society.

Simra’s motivation to start Project Kea was to solve her mother’s plight of finding a nurse for her father. She experienced the pain first hand and therefore knew exactly how Kea had to be designed to serve the patient care giver community. Her mother also struggled to find a medical attendant with basic healthcare knowledge as almost all the medical attendants available are glorified house help. And that’s how the concept of medical attendants’ workshops came from. She reviewed various models and found a simple technical solution to build Kea from scratch on her own.

Simra shared the Kea healthcare portal design and functionality with various doctors in her community and has taken their feedback to make it user friendly. According to Dr Ahmar Tarique, a senior consultant cardiologist in Gurgaon – “Kea is a game changer, given the needs of the growing senior community in our country. It solves a big problem of finding a nurse without paying anything to the middlemen who charge almost 25 to 30 percent commission, degenerating the godly profession to a money making scheme, leaving the helpless with no other way out. Kea reduces the healthcare burden on the common man by at least 25%, if not more.”

Simra plans to extend Kea in phase 2, to provide basic online nursing care to people in villages where there are limited to no health care facilities available. Kea has already onboarded nearly 35 nurses and 17 attendants, and it has also provided 3 nurses and 8 patient attendants to people in dire need for them. Soni, one of the women who partook in the workshops earnestly added “I really learnt a lot from the workshop and I am confident that I can take up a job as a medical attendant. The workshops really motivated me to go ahead and work in this profession.”

Simra founded Kea on the values of kindness, compassion, accountability, and honesty, just as she has been raised. She hopes to become a changemaker in solving problems like healthcare mismanagement, raising awareness about the issues faced in the industry, promoting support for patients via technology and increased accessibility for the marginalized.