A lot of medical people come with Project Medishare sponsored teams to help at the Bernard Mevs/Project Medishare Hospital. Several times we have brought people who needed medical care. They work hard and try to help as many people as they can while they are at the hospital. The hospital never has a shortage of patients! Pray for all the medical teams who come to help the Haitian people and also for the work of Bernard Mevs/Project Medishare Hospital. To read about one of these teams read the article below:
HAITIAN TRIP IMPRESSES LOCAL MEDICAL TEAM
(Cincinnati.com) - Mark Curnutte
Sporadic violence and miles of rubble still litter Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 13 months after the devastating earthquake of January 2010.
Diseases eradicated elsewhere in the world, such as typhoid fever, still plague the poorest of the Haitian poor.
Yet the lasting memories for a team of local doctors, nurses and medical professionals are not negative.
Instead, members of the group - primarily University Hospital staff who spent a week volunteering in a Port-au-Prince hospital - were impressed by the dedication of their Haitian medical counterparts and the gratitude expressed by patients.
"And appreciation, regardless of the outcome, just for us being there," said Kenneth Davis, a University Hospital trauma surgeon.
The Cincinnati-based team, which included pediatric specialists from Cincinnati Children's Medical Hospital Center, was in Haiti from Feb. 19 to Feb. 26. It was part of an ongoing week-long rotation of volunteers staffing Hospital Bernard Mevs in Port-au-Prince. The groups are organized by Project Medishare for Haiti, Inc., based at the University of Miami's School of Medicine.
Jordan Bonomo, a doctor in University's emergency department and neurosciences intensive care unit, led the group that treated several hundred people during the week.
"It's the purest medicine you'll ever practice," Bonomo said. "We followed an internal ethic. We had moral liability, no legal liability."
The infectious diseases encountered in Haiti were different than those the team sees in the United States.
Yet there were similarities.
"Pregnant and bleeding is pregnant and bleeding," Bonomo said.
Davis operated on a man shot in the chest - without benefit of the equipment he has at University.
"It was a through-and-through," he said of the wound. "We had to get creative. The man was released the next day."
The team had instructions to send cholera patients to special hospitals run by the Haitian government to avoid spreading the disease to other patients.
Cholera, traced to a camp of United Nations peacekeeping troops, has killed more than 4,500 people since October. The number of reported cases of cholera is more than 230,000. An estimated 250,000 people died from earthquake.
Babies and children died in Haiti who could be saved in the United States. Yet Haitian nurses did everything they could. Spinal cord patients, bedridden since the earthquake, did not have sores or lesions.
"The people in this group are never ones to feel helpless, but that was the effect of what was outside of the car windows," Bonomo said. "You can't fix Haiti, at best maybe just contribute a small amount. It's humbling.
"At the hospital, this group gave 110 percent where we knew it could do something. Doctors had to relieve nurses on shifts because they had not slept for two or three days. They worked around
the clock."
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