A Daughter’s Passion for Saving Lives

Little Big Feature: Omaima Doukkane

At Little Big Fund (LBF), we’re proud to support passionate social impact leaders from around the world with knowledge, networks, and micro-grants that can catalyze their ideas into action. In this blog series, we’re featuring a few Little Big Believers who’ve been supported by LBF in the past few years. The first story is that of Omaima Doukkane from Morocco. We hope you enjoy these stories, and continue to follow along!

Omaima’s Story: The Hippocratic Oath

In 1996, Omaima’s father pronounced the Hippocratic Oath. At an early age of 7, the power of helping people was engraved in her subconscious. Six years later, as she was traveling from the city of Fes in Morocco at 1 am in the morning, her father pulled over the car with a medical aid box to perform emergency field relief for a roadside accident. Her father was the only doctor on site, and with the use of a simple first aid box and moral courage, he worked tirelessly to save as many lives as possible. Once the ambulances came on the location, her father gave them a report of the situation, and got back into the car, his shoes, still soaked in blood. 

That fateful day, Omaima wished to become like her father. To her, this simple act turned into a lifelong passion to be good, become a doctor, say the oath, and save lives. However, she later realised that things that are good and noble can be achieved in routes other than being a doctor. “If the heart’s longing will help humanity, then there will always be a way,” says Omaima. That passion led her to get a Master’s degree in Marketing & Corporate Management, with a mission to save lives in different ways.

She continued her engagement in the medical field by participating in medical caravans, where doctors, nurses and other medical professionals were mobilised to provide healthcare services in remote areas. She actively participated in the “Youth against Tobacco” workshops, raising awareness on the dangers of tobacco. She even took medical courses taught by her father to deepen her understanding of the needs in the medical field.

Birth of a new idea: IDEM

Combining Omaima’s marketing & tech background with her passion for medicine & health, she started working on an idea for IDEM: a heath centered digital solution that provides critical life saving data to first responders to save lives and time. They collect the right medical data by SAAS (Software As A Solution) operating on site of new concept of mobile blood drives under medical assistance. Their vision? To reduce the rate of preventable death in Morocco and African diaspora.

Omaima has already made great progress on IDEM: having recruited a credible group of advisors, medical students and blood drive representatives in Morocco, in addition to mentors and other supporters around the world.

Problem: A broken Emergency system

Omaima thinks back to the day in 1996 when her father had to jump into action to save the lives of people on the streets. She wishes that he would have been able to save more injured lives. Saving 23 lives was not enough for him, saving more was out of reach because he didn't have simple data:  knowing people's blood type he would have sent the information to the ambulances coming to bring immediate blood bags to prevent haemorrhage and save people on the spot. If he knew people with diabetes he would have given injections, people with Haemophilia would have had a better fate by a major factor dose and antifibrinolytics.

A simple health data is more complex than we can imagine, and the lack of it brings chaos and minimises the chance of survival of the injured people. According to the WHO reports, Africa has the highest rate of avoidable deaths. Narrowing it down to deaths due to haemorrhage in traffic accidents, it represents 73% of 1.35 million deaths per year. However, according to Omaima, the frustrating part is not the numbers but the slow-motion emergency response system. Morocco faces more than 7,360 deaths in traffic accidents, 21,513 deaths due to strokes and 34,450 deaths due to cardiac failure. All of these causes could be prevented with effective medical response coupled with accurate data. 

The broken emergency response in Morocco is translated by the long time it takes for an ambulance to come on site. The chaos persists even when the ambulance arrives at the hospital. It takes on average 89.7 minutes in the whole process wishing that the patient didn't die in between. On the other side, it takes on average 10 minutes for an injured person to die from haemorrhage and if their injuries are severe, the life span may be even shorter.

In the process above, the most important part is to find blood in the blood bank, if the blood type is not available and there is no donor on site, chances of survival are none. In Africa 800 million people are currently in need of blood. Morocco taking part, has only 0.95% of the total population who are donors. The average demand on blood bags daily on the hospitals of Casablanca (the metropolitan city) alone is 400 bags, while the donations do not exceed 120 bags daily. Usually, blood drives are voluntary self-national blood supply, therefore lacking the culture of blood donation is normal since people do not openly communicate about the drought of the blood in the kingdom of Morocco.  Subsequently it emerges from the lack of confidence that Moroccans have in the blood trafficking activities and the lobbying that occurs in private & public hospitals. If they are able to achieve self-sufficiency in blood banks, they can provide blood free of charge for the injured when needed at the same time. The scarcity is what gives these people the chance to take advantage of the absence of law. Abundance will switch the game rules and put more pressure on laws that should frame the blood sector. 

For the two issues we are facing: The lack of medical data and blood shortage, Omaha believes that digital health solutions should be adopted. Since blood is a precious medical resource but with a very limited shelf life, it is the best source for accurate medical data. With IDEM, they will use mobile blood drives to extract the data, making their approach two pronged: providing data for life-saving blood transfusions in hospitals and critical life saving data in emergency situations.

IDEM: How it Works

The IDEM app will have an initial locked platform, the first time users will only be able to book a slot for the blood drive party. Once they register and donate blood, they enjoy a care party in the open space till they are called for data entry. After the test results are out, participants are called in order so that they can unlock the platform by a key ID from the database they have to their app in the phone IDEM that will automatically fill the data. This is their strategy to insure the data accuracy under medical assistance. The application will be accessible for 3rd parties in emergency case situations. Fully HIPAA compliant, only showing non private data. 

As a result, they will be able to cut the blood shortage by 1/3 for the following 5 months of the project implementation. They are currently working to pilot this program in Casablanca & Rabat, targeting university students, which is more than 430,000 university students, so they can collect at least 2,150 blood bags in one mobile blood donation drive.

The average time of 89.7 minutes for the emergency response will be cut to 45 minutes in the first pilot of 5 months. Working towards multiplying the blood supply by 50 in the next 3 semesters, it will increase data coverage by at least 8.9%. This will lead to applying a practical ethics based framework to approaching blood transfusion dilemmas.