Lessons from Haiti: Don’t Take Hot Showers and Drinkable Water for Granted

By Scott Kurpiel, MD Practicing medicine in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was an amazing experience that gave me a tremendous amount of perspective on health care and life. I was fortunate as the trip leader to recruit a well-rounded team of health care professionals, including 10 nurses, six doctors, two EMTs, and one sports rehabilitation therapist. We worked in a gated hospital that was secured by armed guards. The complex contained Haiti’s only full-body CT scanner, which was only available from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Most patients were seen urgently, and were dispositioned from a two- to four-person triage tent. Arriving at the airport. Sick patients were stabilized and treated in a three-bed ED. The adult inpatient ward had 10-12 beds, and the adult ICU had five. The hospital campus also had an outpatient clinic space staffed by Haitian practitioners during business hours, a paralysis rehab ward, a two- to three-bed HIV inpatient area, and a 15-bed functional pediatric unit that included a NICU. Our team slept in bunk beds in a building next to the ED. Enjoying coconut milk. Haiti is an extremely impoverished nation, and its medical infrastructure is severely limited. Practicing emergency medicine there was challenging because supplies considered standard in the United States were not readily available. I had to make a sling out of a T-shirt after relocating a dislocated shoulder, for example, and a splint out of cardboard for a forearm fracture. We relied heavily on ou...
Source: Going Global - Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs