Johannesburg - When healthcare practitioner Ozayr Vally established the 1CC Foundation back in 2018, his main objective was to provide medical help to sick and injured children and neonates within an hour.
The focus of the foundation would be to provide medical transportation services to ill and injured children and neonates in both urban and rural communities in South Africa within no time.
While Vally was determined to achieve his objective, even he knew that pulling off something this big would take a mammoth effort.
In order to achieve the objective, the foundation would need a combination of road, helicopter and fixed-wing (aeroplane) services that would be able to provide definitive ICU care to all children, regardless of financial status, who required urgent care and transportation .
But all this would take plenty of money, something that both Vally and his foundation didn’t have.
But Vally was not discouraged. He knew that with some help, anything would be possible.
Now five years later, the 1CC Foundation is up and running and providing life-changing critical care to children around South Africa.
The foundation provides free ambulance transport to children in a mobile ICU ambulance which is more technologically advanced than anything else South Africa currently has.
It works with the Nelson Mandela Children’s hospital (NMCH) and will soon also be working with the Red Cross Hospital (RCCH) too.
These two hospitals both serve overpopulated areas, with the NMCH serving a population of approximately 14.6 million children in Gauteng and surrounding provinces (including sub-Saharan Africa), while the RCCH serves nearly 2.25 million in the Western Cape.
The foundation, which forms part of the Cape Medics company, provides its services at no cost to the family, whether there is medical aid or not.
“The foundation is the CSR initiative of our company Cape Medics, but we took the additional step of formalising it into a fully registered charity,” said Vally.
“We are a NPC with both NPO and PBO status.The foundation provides ICU level transport to children and infants between hospitals (Intra Facility Transport), where our aim is to be able to deliver this care anywhere in South Africa within a one hour time-frame.”
Vally said he and his team were determined to help where they could as they realised the huge shortage that existed in specialist care.
“I think the main reason is to help where we can. It’s always the spirit of ubuntu to help one, help all and us doing this is in our field of expertise that it feels like a natural extension of Cape Medics.
“Additionally, we all know someone whose child was in hospital and needed specialist care, so this resonates with our spirit of helping where we know it's lacking in the current EMS/Ambulance industry.”
Being able to provide specialist care to children around the country is a service that is much needed, says Vally.
“A big need is an understatement,” he says.
“I would guess that there are probably only a handful of specialist neonatal ICU-type ambulances in the whole of South Africa, in both the private and public sectors.
“It’s a very specialist and overlooked industry. We have been extremely successful at NMCH. We work hand in hand with the hospital and we have seen great results coming from that.”
While Vally and his foundation have so far managed to pull off the impossible, he does admit they still face various challenges.
“Time and funding are our greatest challenges. Time in various ways, true to our name 1CC, a lot of what we are doing is the first in the country, and a lot of time is spent developing processes.
“Telemetry is one of those specifically. A good example is the cellular providers in Cape Town that don't have the same footprint in Gauteng; hence we had to switch to a different provider here.
“Using telemedicine to project medical data has also been a learning curve. We are the first EMS organisation in Africa to use this technology in its full capacity in all aspects.”
The foundation is the first EMS organisation to use technology such as tele-medicine, tele-presence and conferencing in its full capacity.
“Funding is another challenge. It costs R3.5 million per ambulance and a further R4 million a year to operate it. That's R8million per year, and again at Cape Medics we’ve learnt that if you provide something for free, it's a difficult process. Everyone thinks there’s some scam involved somewhere.”
Vally says in order for them to achieve their goal of reaching a patient within an hour, millions more would need to be spent.
“It costs approximately R4 million per year per ambulance. We are funded for two ambulances for this financial year and plan to introduce a helicopter to NMCH this year or early next year. That would be an additional R36 million per year to operate the helicopter for a year's worth of operations.
“Our ultimate aim is to be able to get to any child within one hour. To do so… would (cost) R320 million per year.”
But Vally and his team are determined to reach their goals.
So far, they have been delighted by what they have achieved.
“The foundation has thus far been a huge success. We are able to see direct results and successes from moving infants from a lower acuity hospital to a specialist facility.
“It is such a rewarding experience. Everyday we see the good that can come from a free neonatal ICU service, how we are able to provide first-world medical care as an extension to the hospital.”
Ultimately, Vally and his foundation want to offer free ICU services to anyone regardless of their financial status.
“To be able to provide free ICU level transport to anyone regardless of their financial situation is the dream. We want to offer true universal healthcare at no cost to the patient.
“However, we know that the greatest challenge is funding as both ICU medicine and aviation are some of the most expensive services operating out there.
“But we will never give up.”