Partners In Health Haiti Earthquake Recovery

Thank you for supporting Partners In Health and our work in Haiti.

Though we’ve made significant progress, Cholera is unfortunately still a part of daily life in Haiti. Years after one of the world’s deadliest outbreaks of Cholera, government and international agencies are still working to stop the spread of the disease. Partners In Health is one of these, thanks to supporters like you.

First introduced by UN peacekeeping forces after the 2010 earthquake that struck Haiti Cholera has had a devastating effect on Haiti. 10,000 people have been killed and countless more have fallen ill. That included mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons as well as infants. What makes Cholera a tough illness to combat is the manner in which it spreads and the conditions in which it thrives. Haiti’s environment provides both.

As a waterborne illness, Cholera is contracted through contaminated drinking water. In the absence of latrines or public sewage systems, the world’s poor often drink from the same river or stream used for defecation — infecting water supplies. This means that developing nations and areas affected by natural disasters are often at risk of Cholera outbreaks. In the case of Haiti, this small country has the unfortunate luck of being both a developing nation and a nation routinely affected by natural disasters.

However, there is still hope for Haiti. The number of cases and deaths per year has dramatically decreased. A part of that is due to donors like you.

Relief came to the people of Haiti in 2012 when large scale vaccination programs were launched to protect the people from the harmful bacteria. PIH was among one of the outbreak’s first responders in Haiti. Within several months, PIH had set up 11 Cholera treatment facilities throughout the country and began treating the sick. These vaccination programs were highly successful in reducing the total number of Cholera cases and defying expectations by successfully protecting 90% of adults and 94% of children.

That was until October 4, 2016, when Hurricane Matthew struck the small island nation. As expected with this water-borne disease, after the hurricane hit there was again an increase in the number of Cholera case and deaths. Thankfully, PIH and other relief agencies were there and ready to help the survivors. PIH directly treated 1,682 patients following the hurricane and worked with the Haitian Ministry of Health to help vaccinate an additional 800,000 Haitians.

In Haiti, PIH remains the largest non-profit health care provider, and as such we will continue to work together with our partners there to protect the citizens with quality healthcare, reaching toward the ultimate goal of eliminating deaths and illness due to Cholera. Your support has contributed to the countless lives that were saved from Cholera. We thank you!

Six years have passed since University Hospital in Mirebalais opened its doors and began transforming health care for more than one million people across Haiti's Central Plateau. Since March 2013, thousands of patients have had access to specialized care provided by clinicians working with Zanmi Lasante, as Partners In Health is known locally.

University Hospital has also been home to a growing medical education program, which has graduated 89 residents from a variety of specialties, including emergency medicine, surgery, and pediatrics, to add to the growing health care workforce in Haiti.

In the pre-dawn hours, dozens of patients begin arriving at University Hospital’s main entrance to await their turn for high-quality care, at little or no cost. Last year, clinicians conducted nearly 277,000 outpatient visits and admitted close to 6,000 patients, many of whom had traveled hours to be seen by the facility’s top-notch doctors and nurses.

Once patients have registered and had their vitals taken, they sit in one of several waiting rooms for their name to be called. They come for consultations with maternal and mental health, dental services and radiology, oncology and chronic diseases. Those who are admitted may end up in a number of departments, such as labor and delivery, pediatrics, or isolation—should they be diagnosed with an infectious disease, such as multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.

Regardless of why they come, they will receive care within specialties that would otherwise be out of reach for the rural poor across Haiti.

Here is what we have been up to at University Hospital in Haiti:

Over the past six years, Partner’s In Health has worked tirelessly to make University Hospital a beacon of hope in Haiti. For example, University Hospital is home to six state-of-the-art operating rooms, tucked away in the heart of the facility. In 2018 alone, surgeons performed 1,400 lifesaving cesarean sections and 800 other women's health-related procedures, such as hysterectomies.

The operating theater hosts routine surgeries, such as appendectomies and the removal of tumors. It has also hosted teams of international surgeons who, in collaboration with PIH clinicians, have conducted cleft palate repairs and—most impressive of all—the separation of conjoined twins.

So far, 19 surgical residents have entered University Hospital’s medical education program, four of whom formed the first graduating class last fall.

In 2018, Kay Manmito (PIH’s maternal waiting room) housed more than 400 women so that they could receive the lifesaving, dignified care they needed, from blood pressure monitoring to C-sections. These patients were among the 12 women, on average, who delivered each day in the neighboring hospital’s maternity ward. For expectant mothers like Natacha, whose risky pregnancy brought her to the facility, “the care found here is priceless.”

Partner’s In Health has also provided cancer treatment to more than 570 Patients and much more.