Partners In Health Haiti Earthquake Recovery

Staff, stuff, space, and systems—those are the ingredients, says Dr. Paul Farmer, to strengthen a health care system. With the recent completion of a single facility in Haiti, made possible by your support, PIH has invested in all four.

The new state-of-the-art, 17,000-square-foot distribution center in Port-au-Prince dramatically increases warehouse space for PIH’s stock of lifesaving supplies, is climate controlled, and runs on a sophisticated open-source software system developed by PIH. The supply chain team can now easily find anything—from sterile gloves to lab tests, vitamins to scalpels—quickly pack it, and send it to a clinic. The result: clinics and hospitals provide better, more consistent care.

Before the distribution center opened, getting clinic staff the essential stuff they needed was a slow process. PIH’s supplies lived in a plywood warehouse that could not support a formal inventory system, nor store temperature-sensitive medication. Without refrigeration and a way to easily track materials within the warehouse, many drugs had to be stored off-site, and staff would spend days unloading shipping containers or packing trucks to get necessary tools to a clinic.

“Today we know exactly where we put our inventory. We can receive two containers and prepare three trucks to make deliveries to sites at the same time,” explains Villarson Avignon, supply chain director for PIH in Haiti.

There is still much more we can improve. The team could really use another 17,000 square feet, Avignon says. The difference, however, is already immeasurable for the supply chain team and for doctors, nurses, and patients throughout Haiti. “Nothing comparable,” says Avignon. “Day and night.”

Links:

• New Distribution Center, Software Vastly Modernizes Medical Stor

Thank you for your generous support of Partners In Health / Zanmi Lasante! Each and every day our work to provide high quality health care in Haiti continues. We’re pleased to share with you news from one of our malnutrition clinics, where PIH staff helps starving kids get back to health. An excerpt is below; please check out the full story here.

Lunie (pictured above) was the picture of a mischievous toddler. Shy yet curious, she hid behind her mother’s legs and played peek-a-boo with visitors to her home in rural Lascahobas, Haiti.

Lunie wasn’t always that way. In April 2016, one month after turning 2, she arrived at the Partners In Health clinic in Lascahobas and was diagnosed as severely malnourished. She weighed 23 pounds and measured 31 inches—at least five pounds lighter and three inches shorter than what the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention recommend for average girls her age.

Lascahobas is among the busiest malnutrition clinics supported by Zanmi Lasante. At all of its 12 facilities across the lower Artibonite and Central Plateau regions, PIH enrolled more than 9,000 new cases of starving children in its malnutrition program in 2016 alone.

Across Haiti, roughly 1 in 5 children are starving, and 1 in 3 are stunted because they don’t have enough to eat.

After two months of regular appointments to the clinic, Lunie’s condition had improved from severely to moderately malnourished. Her feet shrunk to normal size, enabling her to walk without pain. She started gaining weight and shooting up in height. Her body wasn’t the only thing changing. Lunie began acting much more like the stereotypical terrible 2-year-old.

By the fall, Lunie and her family received good news: she no longer had to visit the clinic, returned to health.

Links:

• Revisiting Lunie, a Malnutrition Patient in Haiti