In the small town of Cange, Haiti, last week, six Upper Valley medical professionals performed 35 operations on Haitian patients many of whom arrived for surgery dressed in their best clothes because they were so grateful to be treated. The team of volunteers from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vt., returned on Feb. 27 after treating patients in Partners in Health's Cange hospital, DHMC executive director and trip organizer John Butterly said.
Although the hospital is approximately a two-hour drive from Port-au-Prince the country's capital that was devastated by the January 2010 earthquake the majority of the team's patients were not injured in the earthquake, according to Dartmouth Medical School anesthesiology professor and response team member Michael Beach. Cange experienced "very little damage" from the earthquake, which registered a 7.0 magnitude, Beach said.
The team, which arrived in Haiti on Feb. 20, performed various surgeries including amputations, skin grafts, scar revisions and hand surgery at the Zanmi Lasante Sociomedical Complex, according to Robert Jarrett, a DMS anesthesiology professor and response team member. The group performed the 35 operations over five days, and often operated in rooms that were not originally designed to serve as operating rooms, according to Beach and Jarrett.
The medical team provided mostly plastic surgery care for the Hatian patients because "that's what their need was," Thomas LeBlanc, a DHMC nurse and response team member, said.
The relationship between response team members and Haitian doctors resembled a "collegial exchange," according to Beach. The patients were "incredibly genuine," Jarrett said.
Dartmouth Haiti Response, which provides medical teams at PIH's request, had not sent medical providers to Haiti during the past eight months due to concerns regarding the spread of cholera in the country, LeBlanc said. Another response team will travel to Haiti on May 8 to provide orthopedic care, he said.
During the trip, the medical professionals also examined the viability of a future relationship between PIH and the local Cange hospital, according to Beach. Cange was initially chosen as the response team's destination because its hospital has the capacity to provide sophisticated care and was the first medical care center organized by PIH, Beach said.
If DHMC and the Cange hospital form a partnership, "both sides [will] learn something and grow from it," Beach said. Beach said he hopes the hospital will eventually operate without relying on foreign aid.
The Cange hospital was originally designed as a hospital for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis care, and was not built to handle high patient flow, Jarrett said.
After the 2010 disaster, however, the Cange hospital was inundated with patients from Port-au-Prince, according to LeBlanc.
"There was physically no place to put them," he said.
PIH, a leading international health care organization, is currently working to establish a hospital in Mirebalais located less than an hour drive from the Cange hospital that will be completed in 2012, according to Jarrett.
"The Mirebalais hospital [will] become one of the premier hospitals in the country," he said.
Leblanc said "a Dartmouth connection" with the new hospital could benefit students, allowing undergraduate students in several academic disciplines such as engineering and economics to work in various areas of the hospital.
College President Jim Yong Kim co-founded PIH with Harvard Medical School professor Paul Farmer in 1987.
Staff writer Clare Coffey contributed to the reporting for this article.
