Partners In Health began organizing, equipping, and transporting groups of nurses, physicians, rehabilitation therapists, and support staff to Haiti within days of the January 12 earthquake. Since then, more than 700 health care workers and support staff have travelled to various sites in Haiti, working with victims at the earthquake’s epicenter at the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, as well as the waves of refuges flooding into the Central Plateau and Artibonite departments at PIH/ZL’s existing facilities.
Initially, volunteers were primarily specialists in trauma and orthopedic services. With time, the types of health professionals needed in Haiti changed. PIH continued to send nurses and doctors with critical care backgrounds, but increasingly recruited rehabilitation clinicians and mental health professionals.
Some of the strongest medical partnerships PIH/ZL developed were with Haitian medical professionals who live and work in the US and Canada. Men and women from the Haitian American Nursing Association and the Boston Haiti Health Support Team organized into teams and were deployed—sometimes more than once—to Haiti.
Aside from the volunteers who answered Haiti’s call for help, the leadership, grace, and sheer physical force of our Global Health Equity residents—physicians completing their residencies in Haiti through a collaboration between PIH/ZL and Brigham and Women’s Hospital—was crucial to establishing PIH's presence at the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, the largest public hospital in the country. PIH/ZL medical residents made contributions that were nothing short of heroic.
PIH has maintained contact with volunteer health care providers after they returned from Haiti, offering mental health support and encouraging people to share their experiences in a variety of forums. We expect these relationships to support and enrich PIH/ZL’s efforts to rebuild and strengthen Haiti’s health care system in the years to come.
