The moment the ground began to shake, Zanmi Lasate, as PIH has been known in Haiti since the 1980s, sprang into action, receiving survivors by air ambulance, scrubbing into surgery, sending emergency clinicians to the disaster zone, prepping emergency supply shipments, and organizing lifesaving mobile clinics.
The Zanmi Lasante team had spent the decade after the cataclysm of 2010 preparing, training, and building. Miraculously, most of the Zanmi Lasante’s network of public hospitals and clinics were undamaged, including University Hospital, PIH’s 350-bed, internationally recognized teaching hospital in Mirebalais.
Perhaps most crucially, PIH trained a generation of Haitian emergency medicine specialists at University Hospital throughout the previous decade. Those specialists led the emergency response across the nation. |
Over the next two weeks, we’ll walk you through those harrowing first days, as well as the year of recovery efforts that PIH’s unshakable, long-term commitment to the Haitian health system and the people it serves made possible. |
