Haiti

On January 12, the earth shook Haiti to pieces. Buildings collapsed. Family members, friends, neighbors were killed. Many have lost limbs and have suffered severe crush injuries. The Haitian community has been severely injured due to the earthquake, however they have not been destroyed. The Haitian people have a resiliency which is indescribable.

I arrived to Haiti on January 22 on a six-seat plane (I was the co-pilot if you can believe it!). As we circled around awaiting our turn to land at the Port-au-Prince airport, the pilot (who had been flying in and out twice a day since the earthquake carrying in medical personnel and reporters) pointed out the different areas of town, showing me the places most affected by the quake. The streets were lined with people, tent cities had taken over the city.

I was quickly put to work in St. Damien Pediatric Hospital upon arrival – which at the time had something like 300 patients being cared for in a 120-bed hospital. We have been providing care for children and adults. About a week and a half ago we started up four mobile clinic teams. These teams go to different areas of the city to provide care for the people that haven’t been able to make it to hospitals for care. They have found severely wounded people, severely malnourished children, and have begun to see gastrointestinal and respiratory infections. Some of the people they find in the communities have been transported to St. Damien to receive proper care.

The hospital has 2 operating rooms inside, and in the back yard the Italian Civil Defense has set up a field hospital where they have been performing orthopedic and general surgery on our patients. Due to the incredible need, some of our volunteers from Italy and the US worked together to set up a maternity ward. We have had several births here over the weeks, lots of extremely premature babies, and lots of pretty sick mothers have been coming in that require a lot of care by our volunteers and staff.

There are currently about 80 orthopedic post op patients in our facility. If you walk into pretty much any of the in-patient rooms you will find it full of children with amputations of at least one limb if not two. It is a terrible sight.

A couple of days ago we began receiving post op patients from the USS Comfort. We’re trying to get our hospital back to a pediatric hospital, so in order to do so we have set up large tents out in our front yard which is where our adult post op patients have been placed.

We have set up tents outside where some of our patients that are ready for discharge have been sent – those that could go home…if they had one to go back to. So many of our patients have lost everything. So we’re doing our best to give them some place to stay until they’re able to figure something out. Some that have been discharged have been given a bit of money to help them get started again, to buy food for their families. I’ve been told that the gangs are now charging people to stay on the streets – so some of the money they are given prior to discharge is to allow them to pay these “fees”.

My job is to coordinate all of the medical teams coming from all over the world to work in our hospital. This includes deciding what the staffing needs are currently, what the needs may be in the coming weeks, as well as making the schedules for the nurses and doctors for the hospital and our mobile clinics. So basically, I need to make sure we have the appropriate medical personnel coming in to meet our needs, while at the same time not over-staffing ourselves that people get bored or feel useless, and then also making sure all of the rooms have nurses in them and that we have doctors assigned to all of the rooms. I’ve been working with the local nursing coordinator and the human resources manager to coordinate with the staff they have available.

The hospital staff had been drastically reduced following the earthquake. At one point they only had one third of their staff working, as some had been killed, others had lost family or they simply didn’t have the means to show up to work. Transportation has become a big problem. Within the past week they have hired about 30 more nurses to begin to replace those that haven’t been coming which has been quite helpful.