V Care Foundation: Mission, Vision, And Values.pdf

My journey of how being a cancer patient made me aware of the gaps in cancer care in India – providing emotional support when we were still trying to understand the various aspects of mental health, a battle we fight even today. How a housewife learnt to manage both a high educated doctor to the simple villager who had travelled several kilometers to a regional cancer centre and couldn’t even speak the same language. Understand how as a patient advocate, we work towards influencing the cancer care ecosystem in India. Just one small step towards my dream. The compassion and empathy are the basic building blocks that gave courage to move ahead, face challenges and squash the obstacles. It is the team that came along together, taking countless steps. A travel started had many speed breakers and dead ends. But always V(we) paused and found solutions, brain stormed that resulted and results in new goals and new ideas at V Care but never called it a day. Lack of information on cancer care was a big gap – 30 years ago and even today. Our idea was to ensure that scientific language was communicated to a layman in a simple and understandable manner. We began with handwritten notes that were photocopied and shared with patients. As we increased our reach across hospitals, there was a need to have a more structured approach, so we set up V Care Foundation, an organization that was set up by volunteers and run by volunteers. Many challenges, right from bringing the team to work together, group dynamics, team building, and function effectively was indeed a great challenge. The team in V Care is interdependent and we needed each other to build the organization and march forward to where we are now. Honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, willingness to learn and deliver, tolerance and empathy took us closer to those we set out to serve. You can become an expert in your area of specialisation but it will soon become redundant the challenge for ourselves that we get focused on creating the best solution to a given problem we forget that the problem itself may get change we focus on something without realising that the need to change ‘built to last may’ be popular Mantra but ‘build to adapt’ could be the way to go. I knew that emotional support needed more involvement that just providing information. So what started by my going alone, today is a 70 volunteers to who are part of the organization. Being a volunteer led organization, kept the admin costs low and focused our spends on patient support. We built an organization not to last, but to adapt. COVID times have show us how important it was to adopt technology to maintain the support. Nothing is difficult if you put your mind to it. Experience doesn’t necessarily guarantee success, be open to learning and evolving. Ask the questions.