No one can even begin to describe the admiration that we all have for our Lebanese Nurses. Be it in a hospital, school, or in old age houses, a Lebanese nurse will always accomplish his/her mission with heartfelt care and professional excellence whatever the challenges involved.
It is not only the government’s job to ensure that these nurses achieve better work conditions, but also ours, as Lebanese citizens. Taking that all into serious consideration, Hussein Sleiman has created the Find A Nurse social platform.
It all started when the cousin of Hussein Sleiman began to complain about the difficult conditions in the hospital he worked in as a Nurse. He would work double shifts, with little or no rest, to be able to pay for his housing loan.
Seeing that this was the situation of most nurses in Lebanon, Sleiman and his cousin decided to think about ways to solve this issue, while making it self-sustainable and make some profit for themselves.
Their initial plan did not involve technology. Instead, they opened up a small office in the Chouf district. Their aim was to connect the local nurses, who needed to go to Beirut every day for work, with local patients needing home care in the area.
The problem, however, was that Sleiman did not get the funding he was hoping to win from the 2016 competition of Berytech’s Mount Lebanon Youth Entrepreneurs.
At that, he and his cousin were advised to shift from office work to the digital. They resisted at first and went trying their luck in the real-world environment, in an office in Nabatiyeh.
Again, they faced many problems since the hospitals did not trust such a new idea from a small startup, adding that the doctors needed money to refer their patients to Sleiman and his cousin.
In the meantime, Sleiman was participating in some competitions and found a trustworthy team to work with him in digitalizing the idea.
Everything seemed under control and he even decided to apply for a grant from Kafalat, but due to some miscommunication problems, he lost the grant once again.
A lot of difficulties appeared thereafter. He tried funding from accelerators, incubators, developers, and countless other sources. The progress was slow due to lack of coordination, lack of follow up, and lack of proper monetary incentives for the doctors.
It wasn’t until a year later that his efforts started to pay back. He was accepted by an accelerator and finally received the Kafalat funding thus improving their image in the market and increasing people’s trust in them.
His first medical case was a newborn’s mom who was very worried about her baby. He realized that the market for newborns was relatively easy to focus on because they were dealing with healthy babies with low risk.
Since infants’ moms are very active on social media platforms, Sleiman dropped the idea of creating an app and focused instead on running a simple user-friendly website, together with his soon-to-be CTO, Ali Majed.
The platform has served more than 70 patients so far and, as the team grew, the soon-to-be Chief Nursing Officer Khulud Khalil joined in.
Today, this startup project has changed the future of Homecare in Lebanon! Good news is that the idea is set up to continue not only in Lebanon but also in Canada in 2020.
