Haiti: From saving lives to saving limbs

Haiti | 26 January 2010

Médecins Sans Frontières' (MSF) core medical activities in Haiti are still centred on treating people who were injured in the quake, with surgery continuing and post-operative care expanding. But as Rosa Crestani, one of MSF's Emergency Medical Coordinators explains, a second phase underway.

"While we have done life-saving interventions so far, we need now to be able to do more limb-saving interventions. That means operating on people with wounds that are getting infected and which may infect the entire limb in a few days, unless they undergo surgery. To deal with the demand, we are opening a third operating theatre in Choscal and still working them around the clock. MSF has also started running mobile clinics to search for people who need urgent care, but who had been unable to get any yet."

Photo: Ron Haviv | An MSF doctor examines Benitot, 23, who was trapped under La Trinité collapsed hospital for 4 days.

In addition, MSF teams are now dealing with the wider consequences of the disaster. The mental impact of the earthquake is becoming more prominent in the symptoms that are presented by patients coming to MSF's general clinics. One clinic in Léogâne reported that around half of the people they were treating were suffering from mental trauma. Near MSF's hospital location in Carrefour, where the medical staff have been holding mobile clinics for people in the surrounding area, the teams are starting to provide supplementary feeding for children.

Over an 8 day period following the earthquake, MSF’s hospital in Carrefour carried out 208 major surgical procedures and 100 minor ones. 2,400 other injuries were treated and 446 people stayed in the wards over that period. Those facilities were rendered unusuable by an aftershock last week and all patients were transferred from temporary tents to a new ‘hospital’ next door in what had been a school building.

At the same time efforts to expand MSF's facilities in other areas are continuing. The team who recently erected the inflatable hospital in Port-au-Prince are now working on a plan to create a post operative village in another open space in the city. The wards would again be made of canvas, but the fear of being inside solid buildings is still significant for patients who were hurt by the quake. The village will provide nursing care and wound dressing along with physiotherapy and psychological help for apporximately100 patients recovering from surgery.