I visited the home of a patient’s family along with a team from IDEO, the design and innovation firm, to understand in greater depth what a patient goes through. We visited a young mother of two children, the younger of whom, a very naughty boy of around 2 years, was suffering from food poisoning. He had been fed prasadam (offering to the lord) at Tirupati, the site of one of India’s greatest temples. That night the boy started experiencing severe diarrhea, which worsened after the family returned home; he began passing blood in his stools. The alarmed parents took the boy to a local doctor who prescribed one of our products. As the symptoms did not subside, they went to their regular pediatrician who prescribed antibiotic injections to be administered over 10 days. The whole process rattled the mother quite a bit and was clearly traumatic for her family.
She narrated her experiences through the journey and how she worked to bring her child back to health. It was amazing to me to see how dedicated she was to her children’s health. She was ready to do anything for her children to be healthy and normal. She is also proud of her ability to care for her children and how she handles medications and prescriptions. We tested some ideas with her on packaging for convenience, the kind of medicines children like, and what is most important for her in the medicines she buys. We learnt a lot from the interaction.
More importantly, it reinforced to me the importance of health and the importance of our work at Dr. Reddy’s.