Open Door Clinic: We hosted an open-door clinic on February 4th where, despite bad weather, we served 274 patients.  These events are free clinics that give people an opportunity to address personal and family health concerns at no cost.   We are trying to host at least one open-door clinic every month. (See Images below)

 

Outpatient Clinic:  This is our regular community clinic which is open during the day 7 days a week.  For December through February, we served 706 patients in our outpatient clinic.  We see a variety of diseases and conditions in our outpatient clinic.  The most common are related to noncommunicable diseases such as a hypertension and diabetes.  We also see a large number of respiratory infections and urinary infections, and among children a significant number of parasitic infections. 

 

Emergency Room:  Our emergency is open 24/7.  For this period, we served 741 people in the Emergency Room.  The most commonly treated conditions were related to accidents—traffic accidents, accidents at home, and work-related accidents.  A total of 51 people were treated for injuries due to traffic accidents.

 

For this period, 83 people (children and adults) were administered a range of vaccines and more than 780 antiretroviral (ARV) treatments, for those with HIV.   

 

In total, across all of our activities, we have treated 2,972 cases across all of these activities.  Our monthly budget is approximately $9000 which means that it costs us about $9 per case.  This is a lower bound on our treatment costs since we are currently struggling to fund all of the necessary medications. 

 

Other Projects

Library Project:  We have made good progress on completing two library facilities that were started prior to the current political crisis.  Once fully complete these facilities will be integrated with local schools and serve as community resources.  There is an opportunity for fund raising and material donations associated with this project.  We are seeking age appropriate reading resources that are written in Kreyol.

 

Grants: We have submitted two grant proposals during this period.  One is for the development of a Caribbean Telehealth network that would connect the hospital with hospitals in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica and develop staff capacity to use telehealth technology.  The other is a grant focusing on reading literacy, health literacy and social literacy among orphaned and vulnerable girls ages 9-19.  This is another project where we would welcome funding support and material donations.  We are seeking a approximately $4000 to underwrite the costs of food and reading resources (in Kreyol) for participants in this program.  We will know if we received both grants in June of this year.

 

General Community News

The economic and political situation in Haiti continues to be very challenging.  While Borgne remains comparatively stable relative to Port au Prince, the whole country is suffering through an economic crisis that in many ways is unprecedented.  Poverty has become even more prevalent and people do not have money for basic essential items and food.  We are seeing an increase in parasitic infections and malnutrition.