J'can medics save lives in Haiti, despite supply shortage

BY KIMONE THOMPSON Features editor-Sunday Observer thompsonk@jamaicaobserver.com

Sunday, January 31, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti --Propped up by two others, a woman limps her way into the Centre de Santé Bernard Mevs. She looks weak and the man walking behind them looks worried.

She is pregnant, but bleeding, she complains to the Jamaican doctors on hand.

They quickly assess her and determine she is not critical and so must wait until the team completes its ward round, making notes of patients who need surgical attention -- differentiating between those who they can attend to and those who have to be transferred to Miami -- those who need to have bandages changed, those complaining of pain, those in labour.

When they attend to her about an hour later, there is no wheelchair to take her in. There is an examination table, but no sheet to drape her legs. There isn't enough oxygen in the tanks. It is an example of the challenges the team faces.

"There is a lack of sterile equipment. We have to be sharing tools and sterile sheets," anaesthesiologist Jackie Deans-Minott tells the Sunday Observer.

Deans-Minott is part of the team of medical personnel from the Ministry of Health in Jamaica that is providing health care to post-quake Haiti as part of the government's humanitarian response to the crisis.

The unsanitary living conditions of many residents, who now live outdoors in makeshift tents, is also a major concern for the medics who say it influences the way they treat some ailments.

"One of the difficulties we're having is that where we would normally send people home to have their wounds air dried, we can't do it there because of the number of flies. We don't want the wounds to get maggots and that's what will happen if we leave them uncovered. Most of them are sleeping outside so we can't treat them like we want to," says Dr Geronimo Jones as he replaces the dressing on a seven-year-old boy's ankle.

Jones is a US dermatologist with Caribbean roots. He trained at the University Hospital of the West Indies between 2003 and 2005 and wanted to be part of the Jamaican effort to assist the French-speaking country.

On any given day, the medical team sees an average of 50 Haitians at Bernard Mevs, between 40 and 80 at the Food for the Poor clinic in Frères and more than 150 at each outreach location. They dispense medication, dress wounds and perform surgeries.

At Bernard Mevs, which is a small private institution, 12 tents set up in the hospital yard, each housing two or three patients, function as the wards.

"It's a sad, sad place...but we're doing some good work," Deans-Minott tells her mother in Jamaica on the phone.

It might seem oversimplified, but Deans-Minott's comment sums up the situation.

In spite of those odds however, plus the difficulty posed by the language barrier, the team continues its mission and insists that had it not been for Jamaican doctors, things would be far worse for sick and ailing Haitians affected by the 7.0-magnitude earthquake on January 12.

"There were no midwives here. I was the only one at the time," nurse anaesthetist and registered nurse Karen Roberts Mason says of an experience last week at Bernard Mevs.

"The patient was in an advanced stage of labour, so I did the necessary examinations and gave the necessary instructions and she delivered safely. It was a nice little baby boy and there were no complications with either baby or mother. I was happy to be able to help," she sys.

"If it wasn't for us, these poor Haitians would have been suffering more," orthopaedic surgeon Ayanna Crichlow adds.

"I believe a lot of patients would have died had it not been for us," says general surgeon Lincoln Cox. "A lot of them would have been dressed but left with horrible wounds because the other [medical volunteer] teams aren't involved in post-operative care. We not only dress the wounds, we also prepare them for the dressing by providing them with analgesics."

Dr Crichlow explained that the team's emphasis in responding to the earthquake victims has now changed. "At first it was on acute surgical care because we had crush injuries and vascular injuries and then there were infections that arose because the people with those injuries couldn't get help soon enough and so we had to amputate, but we have stopped amputating now. Our last one was last Thursday.

"We are now in the stage of taking care of non-life threatening injuries, orthopaedic injuries," she said.

The medics are concerned, however, that once their mission is over and the team leaves Haiti, their patients could get lost in the system, or rather the lack thereof.

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J'can medics save lives in Haiti, despite supply shortage