Gruelling hours. Stress. Junk food and red bull. Obesity is rising in America's economic frontier, and the consequences diabetes and heart disease—could be dire.
Early five years ago, the global health organisation AmeriCares started a mobile clinic in the chaotic slums of Mumbai, where sanitary facilities and running water are limited and entire families sleep in a single room. Throngs of residents who simply can’t afford bus fare to a local hospital line up outside roving vans to receive treatments for a host of respiratory and gastrointestinal disorders. Around the same time, the so-called Health Wagon began traversing rural Appalachia, offering screening for diabetes-related eye disease to malnourished mountain dwellers.
Since these innovative programmes took root, mobile clinics have blossomed around the world to provide health care to those who are unable to procure such services themselves. According to the American Journal of Managed Care, there are now nearly 2,000 such programmes in the U.S. alone. Most of the millions of patients are homeless, disenfranchised, displaced, or uninsured. Most. But not all.
On a late-summer afternoon in Northern California, another mobile clinic is stationed in a more improbable location: among the BMWs and Teslas in the parking lot of the highly groomed corporate headquarters of Nvidia, a graphics semiconductor titan in Santa Clara County, home to the nation’s highest median household income. The estimated average annual salary on this campus: roughly $130,000 (Rs 82.1 lakh). And yet there’s a sparkling 37 ft. RV with two exam rooms and a lab. It bears the markings of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF), a nonprofit with 15 offices in the Bay Area.
Denne historien er fra February 2016-utgaven av Fortune India.
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Denne historien er fra February 2016-utgaven av Fortune India.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på