I'm not entirely sure that as a patient in one of these hospitals, I'd appreciate the (white) girl with a camera strapped to her forehead walking through the place.
Trading patient privacy for donations seems like a worse deal than needs to be made here.
Grace from Watsi here. I totally understand where you're coming from based on how the post is written - our fault for being hyperbolic. Of course, we would never walk through a hospital and record people without their explicit permission.
That said, what I've learned after talking with dozens of Watsi patients is that the overwhelming majority of them feel compelled to share their stories. They hope it will enable more people to access the healthcare they deserve.
I recently dropped 70k rupees on elective surgery. If the girl with the camera paid for my surgery I'd be happy to let her film the whole thing.
I've had medically necessary surgery done also. If this girl or her org were to pay for that, and all I had to do was fulfill stupid racial stereotypes on camera while being mocked by silly foreigners (or something equally offensive), I'd be thinking "yay, I can walk again!"
Now being a bunch of do-gooder western types, I'm sure Watsi actually goes to great effort to maintain patient privacy. But even if they didn't, patient privacy is really a small price to pay for important medical interventions.
I imagine the Watsi team (Grace in this case) has earned the respect and trust from both the hospital and patients to walk through with a camera like that.
In my limited experience visiting West Africa, there's rightful skepticism of expats but once you build trust they're very warm to you. The level of trust you have as a foreigner is sometimes higher than a local. My sister moved to Burkina Faso a year ago. She's not white (Indian) and no one there knows she's a doctor since she doesn't have her license yet. The locals trust her medical advice based entirely on the fact that she's an expat.
I'm not sure how different Kenya is from West Africa and realize the Watsi team was only there for a couple weeks but I think the same applies considering their comittment to the area.
Probably a lot of room for discussion here, but I think it's problematic to conflate this documentary trip with Watsi's general practices for dealing with patient information – doesn't appear that they gave out any of their patients' personal information in this piece, and they generally do a great job limiting the amount of information listed on any given patient's page.
Of course, there are a lot of health care needs that are by nature private or could endanger the patient well-being if it became public that some procedures were done. I believe they have an anonymous fund that receives a percentage of all donations to attend to just those types of issues.
If any information on any patient should be given out is a bit of a different question.
Trading patient privacy for donations seems like a worse deal than needs to be made here.