By Maya Brownstein | Annual Giving Assistant
Above: Oncology nurses Yolande Nazaire (from left) and Vierzela Pierre care for patients undergoing chemotherapy at University Hospital.
Thank you for supporting Partners In Health and University Hospital in Mirebalais, Haiti.
University Hospital is dramatically widening access to oncology services in Haiti as the country's only facility to provide comprehensive cancer care, free of charge. According to Dr. Ruth Damuse, oncology program director for Partners In Health and Haitian sister organization Zanmi Lasante, before University Hospital and its oncology services, "people in rural Haiti didn't have any chance to have access to cancer care. A few patients would try to get the services in the capital, Port-au-Prince, but the cost would be so high, they would start a treatment and stop in the middle of the process."
Now, each day an average of 22 patients visit University Hospital's oncology department, where they can be diagnosed through biopsies, CT scans, and the expertise of doctors at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital; treated with chemotherapy and surgery; and supported with palliative care and psychosocial services.
Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers treated at University Hospital -- of the 1,600 biopsies the oncology department performed in 2015, nearly 40 percent were breast-related. At the below links, you can learn about the path of a breast cancer patient at University Hospital and hear more from Dr. Damuse about the evolution of cancer care in Haiti.
Thank you again for your generous support - it truly is what makes this work possible.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
