A Dartmouth response team of 14 doctors, physical and occupational therapists and nurses left for Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Sunday to reinforce ongoing post-earthquake relief efforts in the region. The team will continue the work of the 25 Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center personnel previously sent to the area, and will try to "plug the holes" in the operations of the University Hospital in Port-au-Prince, according to Virginia Beggs DMS'95, a DHMC nurse practitioner and the team's co-leader.
Although many nongovernmental organizations have scaled back relief efforts in Haiti, there is still a significant public health emergency in the country, according to document circulated by Dartmouth Haiti response organizers requesting volunteers.
Dartmouth began sending medical and financial aid and health care workers shortly after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on Jan. 12. The College, along with DHMC and the Dartmouth Medical School, has worked with Partners in Heath, a non-profit global heath organization co-founded by College President Jim Yong Kim, to assist emergency responders in and around Port-au-Prince.
Seven physicians, five nurses and two physical and occupational therapists comprise the volunteer team that departed on Sunday. The health professionals are from DHMC as well as neighboring health centers including the Maine Medical Center, according to John Butterly, the executive vice president of Medical Affairs at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health and leader of the Dartmouth Haiti Response.
"Our goals in Haiti are to provide care, educate and learn from our Haitian colleagues," Butterly said.
Members of the response team hope to continue sending Dartmouth and PIH teams to the University Hospital through June of this year. After the 14-person team returns on May 30th, another relief team will depart for Port-au-Prince on June 10th for approximately two weeks, Butterly said.
"My personal goals are to provide help to patients and to provide relief to Haitian doctors," response team leader Scott Rodi, the section chief for emergency medicine at DHMC, said. "What we do is going to be completely driven by what we find when we get there.
Rodi, who joined the DHMC staff in 2001, has prior experience working in third world countries, he said.
Rodi and several of his colleagues volunteered to participate in a relief mission as soon as they heard the news of the earthquake, according to Rodi.
The response team was initially in need of surgeons, but as relief efforts have been more concentrated on inpatient care, the effort is relying more on physicians and nurses who specialize in treating hospitalized patients with a wide range of afflictions, according to Rodi.
Beggs said the team would do "whatever is needed."
"Some of us will be working a lot of night shifts in order to off-load some of the Haitian team's work," she said.
The team will also be performing various tasks outside of inpatient care, according to Butterly. One physician will work with both PIH and the World Health Organization to teach local laboratory personnel how to diagnose tuberculosis, he said.
Beggs has worked at DHMC off and on since 1975. She has never participated in an international relief effort before, she said.
"I've just been interested in doing something with PIH ever since I read Mountains Beyond Mountains,'" Beggs said. "So I volunteered for the effort."
Members of the team were informed that they would participate in the mission on May 7, according to Beggs.
The College has donated over 20 tons of medical supplies and donations from the Dartmouth community, which total over $1 million combined, according to a DHMC press release.
Several national news outlets have recognized the College for its efforts toward earthquake relief in Haiti.
Kim has lauded students' efforts, noting that he wants them to engage and educate themselves about the issue, The Dartmouth previously reported.
Kim has assured the Dartmouth community that "95 percent of their donations will go to the earthquake relief," noting that PIH has relatively low overhead and excellent access to needy populations.
"We are working directly with PIH," Butterly said. "So our team was built around PIH's assessment of who is needed."
Physicians and nurses at DHMC have a long-standing history of performing missions similar to the Haiti response, according to Butterly, but the scale of the current relief effort is unprecedented for the institution as a whole.
"Dartmouth relief teams have been described by non-Dartmouth teams as being the best in the field," Butterly said. "Dartmouth sets the standards for what a great job you can do under such adverse conditions."
