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The Haiti earthquake is old news to most people by now, but teams of doctors from all over the world continue to rotate in and out of the country, some working in what could be termed M*A*S*H units, others in more permanent clinics.
One of those doctors is Brian Lee, a plastic surgeon from Fort Wayne. He spent a week in Haiti in February and plans to return soon.
Many doctors and nurses are interested in helping, but the problem many face is figuring out where to go to volunteer. The number of medical facilities in Haiti is limited. Medical personnel can’t just show up unannounced.
So Lee is trying to put together a registry of volunteers, an ambitious project that would require scores of medical workers.
Lee’s goal is to assemble teams of two emergency room doctors, two family-practice physicians, a physical medicine and a rehab physician, three to 10 nurses, two paramedics, three physical therapists with wound and prosthetic experience, a prosthetist and supply personnel.
A new team every week.
The plan doesn’t stop there. Lee also hopes to assemble a surgical team that will include an orthopedic surgeon, anesthesiologist, a plastic surgeon, two surgery techs and two surgical nurses. A different surgical team would travel to Haiti once a month.
The hope is to have a steady flow of new teams every week for the next few months, possibly for longer than that.
“We need organization,” Lee said.
Medical personnel can get information about signing up by calling Lee’s office at 490-7111.
The teams would work out of the Mission of Hope, the same mission where a team from The Chapel in Fort Wayne went last month.
The Mission of Hope is a story in itself. Two Huntington University graduates, Brad and Vanessa Johnson, started the mission in 1998 after they went on a mission to Haiti and actually watched a child starve to death. When the two left to start their mission, they carried only four suitcases with them.
At the time the earthquake hit, the mission had expanded to include a clinic, church, school and orphanage.
Other facilities, including a new hospital with extra surgical suites and a prosthetic center that will fit people with artificial limbs.
The hospital, volunteers tell us, could be finished in as little as a year, provided funding is available.
The clinic alone is treating about 250 patients a day, Lee says, and its associated mission is providing thousands of meals a day to Haitians left homeless by the earthquake.
The new facility, just a few miles north of the capital Port-au-Prince, would find itself an important part of the medical infrastructure of Haiti, particularly in area of prosthesis fitting and distributing.
As time goes on and more of the temporary medical clinics that have been set up by foreign doctors close down, this mission will become more and more important.
