College President Jim Yong Kim met Friday with several Dartmouth-based surgeons, physicians and nurses involved in the College's response to the ongoing crisis in Haiti. Nine of the group from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will comprise an emergency response team arriving in Santo Domingo, in the nearby Dominincan Republic, Saturday morning, armed with hundreds of pounds of medical supplies to provide care to the thousands injured by the Jan. 12 earthquake.
According to Kim, two planes will leave tomorrow carrying medical supplies and personnel, and are expected to arrive in Santo Domingo at noon Saturday. Government officials will then meet the team and drive approximately seven hours to Zanmi Lasante Sociomedical Complex, one of Partners in Health's projects, located in Cange, Haiti.
Kim was one of the co-founders of PIH, a non-profit global health organization, which he said will serve as a liaison between Dartmouth and efforts in Haiti, The Dartmouth previously reported.
Rajan Gupta, one of the organizers and the director of the trauma ward at DHMC, said the mission will be aimed at "simply helping the people of Haiti."
"I expect chronic wounds [and] crush injuries," Kurt Rhynhart, a DHMC trauma surgeon who provided medical care to U.S. military forces in Iraq for a year, said. "It may be similar [to Iraq] in the sense of just a lot of bad injuries in a very austere environment."
PIH has pledged to fully fund the DHMC mission and to allow the use of ZL's facilities, Kim said. The complex has not suffered any damage from the earthquake due to "a focus on construction with great care," he said.
"Many [physicians from ZL] have gone into the city to find family members and are now running medical care out of their homes," Kim said, also noting that the incoming volunteer effort will be able to immediately utilize now-vacant operating suites.
Kim and team members in attendance said they faced difficult choices about how many medical staffers they could send, as increasing the team's size takes away cargo space for medical supplies. Only nine seats on the plane are available for the group, which includes nurses and orthopedic, plastic and anesthetic surgeons.
Those in attendance also cited security as a major concern, noting that the group would operate only in secure areas of the country.
National media attention has focused in on the violence in the urban city of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.
"Our biggest problem is security," Delfin Antonio Rodriguez, rescue commander for the Dominican Republic, told The Daily Telegraph. "There's looting and people with guns out there, because this country is very poor and people are desperate."
PIH's facility in Cange, a rural area, will serve as the team's base of operations. The biggest security risks exist in the cities, according to Kim.
The First Lady of the Dominican Republic, Margarita Cedeo de Fernndez, has pledged help to move the team into Haiti and ensure their security, Kim said. The Clinton Foundation, which Kim said has helped PIH in the past, may also offer security assistance.
Sending in a second wave of medical aid will depend on critical feedback from the emergency response team once in Haiti, Kim said.
The information the team has about ZL's current needs is "credible," according to Kim, and will be used to judge what supplies will be sent with the first team.
The scale of the disaster has triggered a broad, international humanitarian response. CNN has reported that the death toll from Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude earthquake may exceed 100,000.
Many other organizations and volunteer medical efforts have traveled to Haiti to provide emergency medical care.
Doctors Without Borders, an international medical humanitarian organization, has been able to set up medical facilities, including an inflatable field hospital, according to Kim.
The group's permanent facilities in Haiti were damaged by the earthquake, according to the group's web site.
