PROJECT HAITI

Following Submitted by Adele

We did Laparoscopy surgery this week in Pignon with the Project Haiti team ( March 30-April 2, 2009). We performed 21 cases.

We also held a Laparoscopy Course with 12 Doctors from Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haitian that recieved training. Everything went very well except for the Airline transportation from Port-au-Prince to Pignon.

For this period Tropical Air and Caribintair does not have airplane available and the other Airline, Tortug'Air is very very expensive. The group used the services of MAF and of Mr. Frantz, who has a small plane . Project Haiti team left Pignon to Cap-Haitien (April 4, 2009)

April 3nd, we had a meeting with Paul Severson, Knox Singleton, Patty Nelson, Mike Evans and Pignon staff (Adele, Evenel, Gyrlene, Dr. Batsch) about shipping and maintenance. 

Project Haiti do not ship any boxes to Pignon this year (2009) because the customs charges in Haiti is very expenses. Per Dr. Paul suggestions that we prepare a list of Medicines and medical material that we use daily at the Hospital and material that we do not need or do not use. That we also include a list and price of all products that we can we find in Haiti and what we cannot find. So team do not ship unused or unneeded materials and loose money on customs. This is a point that will discuss at the PFH Board meeting in June 2009.

Submitted submitted By DR Paul Severson, Project Haiti.

Adele, Thank you for excellent communication and representing the hospital in Dr. Guy's absence.

To further supplement your report, we have suggested that:
1) The administrative staff of HBP take a very active and vigilant role in the air transport crisis we currently have in Haiti. This will be particularly important for large teams attempting to fly together and teams that do not have experienced team members.

2) Several team members (Dr. Liz Babu and Ron Vitales) were victims of Caribbintair charters and missed their flights. We do not recommend using them at this time, because they are totally unreliable. Their credit is no longer extended in Port so they have to fly to Cap to buy gas, but only with cash - they are routinely several hours late for chartered flights. Tropical currently is not flying at all - they could no longer afford to lease their planes from the DR and hope to buy 3 planes in the future to once again serve our needs. But we have no idea if and when that might happen. That leaves us with MAF and Frantz Gabriel (5 seat and 3 seat capacity respectively). Bernard Celestin is a pilot and a good friend of the mission, but is currently not flying because his license has lapsed -we hope that will change in the near future.

3)Bernard Celestin was able to get the air-conditioner going again - the problem was a lack of maintenance as they had not been cleaned and were completely clogged with dirt and debris, causing the high limit switch to shut down the unit. As a result of the expenses incurred to diagnose and correct the problem on an emergency basis, Project Haiti paid a discounted amount of $1000, and Bernard has agreed to donate the rest to HBP. We have recommended a regular cleaning schedule every 3 months, and an annual professional maintenance - if done properly, these units should function for many, many years.

4) Project Haiti will no longer ship supplies to Pignon once a year in large volumes in a designated cargo plane. In these difficult economic times, it no longer makes sense. None of us really have a clue as to what percentage of the shipped items are actually critically needed. Assuming we were lucky and we happened to guess right, and 50% were actually needed, we all need to think about the donations we are wasting writing checks to MFI, customs and shipping organizations in the US. For example, assume we ship 10,000 lbs. We would pay $15,000 to MAF, $7000 to customs (!!!), and maybe $3000 to truckers in the US (if that is not donated) - that means that it potentially costs the hospital $25,000 to get those supplies. This is why we need to re-think our approach. For our part, we will only ship critically needed items that the hospital requests whenever the inventory runs low. This means we will finally need to put in place an inventory management system. According to Sue Ishee, we are much less likely to get taken advantage of by customs by shipping boxes in small quantities. We also need to consider recovering all monies spent on customs by actually utilizing the franchise recovery process that is utilized by other missions in Haiti.

5) Finally, Gyrlene reported to us at the closing celebration at Dr. Guy's house that the hospital received $20,000 for operations performed during the week of the MIS training course. That results in a net gain of $36,000 to the hospital for Project Haiti's two weeks in Pignon. Additional monies were provided to the hospital to purchase needed supplies in lieu of only a small shipment (7 extra bags (350 lbs.) at no cost brought in by the team).
Thanks for a great week!

Paul Severson, MD, FACSPresident, Project Haiti, Inc.