I copied this from a newsletter email from Joel Trimble. It so fits what happens here. We have a nurse living here right now who is working at St Nicholaus hospital, Debra Bachman, of whom I've spoken before. A patient died the other night because no one would go get the oxygen machine. The man mopping the floor said it's not my job, the nurses said, it's not my job. Yesterday, Deb went to get the heart monitor and it was gone. "It was just right here, where is it?" she demanded. Finally, a nurse took her to a room and the monitor was under a table. These are the injustices, the irony, the ...what would you call it? Read Joel's take from another hospital above Port au Prince.
As news of the quake spread around the world, American medical professionals flew into the Dominican Republic and drove across the border into Haiti. Some chartered private planes to rush to victims need. They brought supplies, machines, everything they could carry including their living quarters - tents and sleeping bags.
Yesterday Haitian hospital personnel began to return to work. They found their understaffed inefficent businesses miraculously treating double their capacity. Dressings are changed daily when and meds are dispersed immediately free of charge. Patients are handed their records for follow up treatment at any of the field hospitals set up in and around Port au Prince..
ortho patient"Your hospital will be more dysfunctional"
Early morning organizational meetings previously run by professional disaster response coordinators are now conducted by indifferent Haitian hospital directors and administrators.
In a meeting at the Hopital Communautaire on Rue Frere, Delmas yesterday a Haitian doctor insisted that all patient records be kept by the hospital. There is a shopping bag of such records behind the admission window already. An American orthopedic surgeon stunned by the demand said, "If you do that your hospital will be more dysfunctional than it already is."
Outside the hospital Haitians live under sheets strung between trees and in the open on cardboard. They are homeless, they are wounded, they have no cash. Inside Haitian staff are locking the donated supplies in depots and charging for every prescription, x-ray, blood test and IV bag.
American doctorsHoarding medical supplies
At Haiti's Baptist Mission Hospital a 25 year old Haitian woman in critical condition mandated blood coding for transfusion. A concerned American doctor walked with her translator to the lab, the order in hand. The laboratory door was padlocked shut. It was a half hour before closing time.
The translator asked where the lab tech was, a guard said she went home. A few moments later he returned with the lab tech and the results were in the doctor's hand. A donor was found and the Haitian patient's life was spared.
In the OR where the transfusion was performed the translator reported the incident to a Haitian American nurse who said, "I will go and talk to her now."
The next morning when the translator came to begin another fifteen hour day with American medical team the Haitian Baptist Hospital Administrator told her, "Your services are no longer needed here." Even when the translator related the patient's crisis and the lackof translators, the Administrator was indifferent.
patients in ortho wardCompliance with negligence
The culture of indifference in Haiti dictates tacit compliance with inefficency and negligence, even when that indifference costs lives. The translator who reported the lab's early closing had violated that cultural rule.
Today American doctors at the Haiti Baptist Mission Hospital are on notice their continued mission at the hospital is in jeopardy if the offending translator reappears. The twenty five year old Haitian woman who received the transfusion survived but that is apparently in the culture of indifference.
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