My life as a social entrepreneur
A journey of professional independence, solving global healthcare problems, and creating positive impacts
While completing my residency in Lahore, Pakistan, I observed problems associated with non-healing wounds, heart failures, stroke, and dependency among patients recovering from cardiac surgery which compelled me to think of ways to address these problems at the community level to ease these patients’ burdens and bring them access to dignified in-home care. This led me to develop a complete out-of-hospital service platform with an array of services integrated and delivered through a single channel which I realized would solve this global issue. Hence, after dropping out from residency of cardiac surgery to pursue this goal, the conceptual care platform was born in 2009 and called “Health at Home.”
Health at Home is an innovative healthcare service delivery organization, established to address present day healthcare issues for people who do not necessarily need a hospital visit or could not visit a hospital independently. It has been recognized as an innovative platform creating new and inclusive jobs, solving healthcare problems associated with disability and dependence, bringing affordable and ethical healthcare to populations who were not served through any organization or institution before. Health at Home was awarded the prestigious Surya Nepal Social Entrepreneurship Award in 2012 and was a winner of the Professional Fellow Poster Competition held in Washington, D.C. in 2014. As a service delivery platform with different streams of healthcare services, Health at Home has been copied and replicated in local markets in Nepal and throughout South Asia. We believe our social franchisee model can be beneficial for other population bases and communities globally.
We aim to bring Western knowledge, experience, academics, and standards of homecare blended with Eastern values of compassion and empathy for in-home care management through a universal platform. This technology will be an amalgamation of both worlds’ best values and practices.
Quitting my cardiac surgery residency to become an entrepreneur and charter through unknown territory towards an unpredictable outcome was a major challenge. Convincing family members that the solution I wanted to provide would become sustainable, stable, and scalable in the future was also one of the biggest challenges in my whole journey as an entrepreneur. Once conceptually established and recognized as a success, these initial complications were eradicated, but now new obstacles arose: raising funds for developing technology, hiring and grooming management teams for bigger and better outcomes, and other necessities that come with the evolution of an organization. Personally, I never thought of my journey as a struggle, as I found excitement in solving these complicated puzzles and evolving persistently.
Being a social entrepreneur has become a vehicle for professional independence for me. It has given me a free hand to solve global healthcare problems innovatively, create positive impact in terms of job creation and fostering an inclusive workplace, and build a replicable social franchisee model. Becoming an entrepreneur represents a philosophical value where one can decide his or her own fate by working creatively to create scalable, sustainable, and impactful projects.
Famous American poet Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” has a message that is important for every budding entrepreneur to remember, as it’s all about choice and the uncharted territory that we have to move towards when we decide to take up entrepreneurship as our future journey.
Read Dr. Dhakal’s “Meet the GES Delegate” profile, also found in this GES Medium publication.
