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Helping hands in Haiti
(by Kara Krekeler - March 02, 2010)
In late January, Clayton Fire Chief Mark Thorp escaped the cold St. Louis weather and traveled south for what he called a “winter vacation in the tropics.”
But his trip was anything but relaxing.
On Jan. 22, Thorp and Clayton fireman and paramedic Jeff Counts traveled with the Missouri 1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to help run a field emergency room in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake.
Thorp, the team’s commander, estimated that of the 34 members on the team about 20 are from the St. Louis area and many work at area hospitals.
Along with a Seattle-based International Medical Surgery Response Team, Missouri 1 DMAT lived and worked for two weeks at the Gheskio Field Hospital, located within Quisqueya University in downtown Port-au-Prince, one of the hardest-hit areas during the earthquake.
Thorp said that large portions of the university had either collapsed or suffered severe structural damage during the earthquake; the areas that remained had to be reinforced so that relief workers could set up their cots and mosquito nets in an outdoor courtyard.
While there, the Missouri DMAT saw around 200 patients a day, performed up to 20 surgeries a day and helped deliver more than 30 babies.
The team also dealt with violence-related injuries that popped up as Haitians fought for limited resources. The first night they arrived, team members tended to the victims in a triple shooting that took place just outside the hospital.
Since helping found the team in 1997, Thorp has responded to natural and man-made disasters throughout the U.S., but this was the first time he and the team had been sent abroad. For medical relief workers, the foreign mission meant a round of vaccinations and anti-malarial drugs, as well as training with masks that would guard against tuberculosis infections.
It also made for some interesting challenges, Thorp said, not the least of which was dealing with the lack of governmental structure in the wake of the earthquake.
“In a domestic situation, it’s our federal government in charge. It’s our country, we set the rules and we have a specific plan. The Haiti government was all over the place, and it took a while to get anything done,” Thorp said. “Instead of being the main response force, it was a challenge to compete for resources.”
For example, because of a single-runway airport and no landing schedule for multiple countries’ relief teams and supplies, it took nearly a week for the first DMAT group from Massachusetts to get into Haiti.
Once everyone was on the ground and working, the Haitian culture and language continued to present challenges. The team ended up hiring several local people to act as interpreters, translating the many Creole dialects they encountered on a daily basis, and worked with several Quisqueya University medical students, few of whom would work at night — due to martial law — or on Sundays.
“They take Sundays very seriously, even during a disaster,” Thorp said, noting that he and his team had to work hard to convince a local X-ray technician to work for even part of the day.
By the time the Missouri DMAT left, the field hospital — which has an operating room, emergency room, pharmacy and pediatric ward, among others — became the preferred hospital for high-level care in Port-au-Prince, with other field hospitals sending their toughest cases there.
But the high-level status for the Gheskio hospital presented its own challenges. Even though the DMAT volunteers were working in a temporary hospital without many of the amenities found in the U.S., that level of care is still much higher than what’s regularly available in Haiti.
“We worried about what would go on after we left. We had to figure out what sorts of treatments they’d be able to continue with,” Thorp said. “If we sent them back into the tent city, nobody would be able to follow up with them.”
For example, instead of operating and putting pins in a badly broken leg, Thorp and those he worked with would put the leg in a cast and in traction because follow-up care for the pin operation wouldn’t be available.
The Gheskio Field Hospital is still open, and will remain open through the end of March, much longer than most of the other hospitals set up by the U.S. and other countries that volunteered immediate aid. Outside the hospital, foreign aid has already been scaled back in an attempt to help Haiti rebuild itself.
But that doesn’t mean Thorp and his team have left the experience behind.
“We made friends with a lot of the staff, and we e-mail back and forth. Several people are still corresponding with interpreters,” he said.
The hospital has continued to receive a lot of attention from the international press and dignitaries. Not long after Thorp’s team left, President Bill Clinton visited the hospital.
While such attention provided a lot of sometimes-unwelcome breaks in his long days working at the hospital, Thorp said that it was worth it.
“It was disruptive, but it got the message out” about the Haitian people and their needs, he said.
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