Expanding comprehensive health services in the Central Plateau and Lower Artibonite

Within hours after the earthquake, patients with crushed and broken limbs and other severe injuries began arriving at the network of 12 PIH/ZL hospitals and health centers in the Central Plateau and Lower Artibonite regions north of Port-au-Prince. PIH/ZL staff responded immediately by opening up new emergency wards and bringing in volunteer surgical teams and supplies needed to run operating rooms around the clock at four of our largest facilities – Cange, Hinche, St. Marc, and Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite – with the help of dozens of partners.

Even while we were rapidly ramping up our surgical capacity, PIH/ZL anticipated the looming need for post-operative care, physical therapy, rehabilitative medicine, and mental health and psychosocial services for earthquake victims. Staff were hired and trained to create a new rehabilitative medicine team. And the mental health and psychosocial support team that had previously focused almost all of its efforts on a program to support children affected by HIV more than doubled its size to meet new patient needs (see section on strengthening specialty services).

Shortly after the earthquake, PIH/ZL also initiated plans to strengthen clinical and community-based services to meet the increased demands created by an influx of tens of thousands of people displaced by the earthquake at all of our sites. Surgical wards were renovated and improved at l’Hôpital Saint Nicolas in St. Marc and in the health center at Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite. Plans have been completed and construction has begun for new internal medicine wards in both Petite Rivière and Verrettes. Since the outbreak of cholera in the area, the partially constructed wards have been adapted for use as cholera treatment centers.

Zanmi Lasante has also scaled up the social support, community development, and poverty alleviation programs fundamental to breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and disease. Providing access to food, clean water, education, and job opportunities has become even more critical for poor families and communities that have taken in relatives and friends displaced by the earthquake.

Since the earthquake, our agriculture program, Zanmi Agrikol, has expanded production of the fortified peanut paste used to treat severe acute malnutrition, and provided tools, seeds, training, and a guaranteed market for hundreds of local farmers. We have also doubled the number of agricultural agents we employ in order to help more than 1,000 poor farm families improve their crop yields, dietary diversity, and food security.

In partnership with charity: water, a US-based non-profit organization, PIH/ZL is constructing eight spring-capping projects – ensuring access to clean drinking water in some of the most remote communities where we work – and has built and distributed hundreds of dry latrines and biosand filters in communities where water and sanitation resources were inadequate even before the influx of earthquake refugees and the cholera outbreak.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, ZL has also expanded our longstanding support for educational opportunities in the Central Plateau and Lower Artibonite to support children displaced from Port-au-Prince. We have enrolled 400 new students in the 29 Ecole Populaire schools that we support; have hired more teachers, bringing the total on our payroll to 225; and have almost doubled the number of children receiving school fee assistance from 10,000 to 19,260.