Hospital for Special Surgery helps Haiti victims

A team of anesthesiologists, nurses and orthopedic trauma surgeons from Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan headed for Haiti on Friday and have been performing surgery and tending to those impacted by the earthquake ever since.

Led by David L. Helfet, M.D., and Dean G. Lorich, M.D., and including physicians from NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the team has been working round the clock at Hopital de la Communaute Haitienne in Port-au-Prince suburb of Petion-Ville and have already performed more than 50 surgical procedures. With air transport provided by global medical device company Synthes and surgical supplies donated by Synthes, Hospital for Special Surgery and NewYork-Presbyterian, the team is working under extremely rudimentary conditions with limited security.

The medical team currently in Haiti will be relieved tomorrow evening when a new team from Hospital for Special Surgery will take their place. "This is an important humanitarian effort that requires our team to perform hands-on medicine on people who have been suffering since the earthquake last week," said Dr. Helfet. "We had to quickly adjust from the high tech Hospital for Special Surgery environment with the most state-of-the-art radiologic and surgical equipment, to a makeshift hospital where we are trying to save lives and limbs."

According to Louis Shapiro, president and CEO of Hospital for Special Surgery, "It's in times like these that we need to act with skill and compassion. We are extremely proud of our team and the contributions they are making to help the people of Haiti. We will continue to contribute to these efforts as best we can in the coming days and weeks."

Comments

  1. Sam B Sam B United States says:

    I commend all involved in this for their work in Haiti. But I was very saddened to see that three of the doctors decided to use the trip as an excuse to score cheap political points in the Wall Street Journal. Politics have no place in a disaster such as this but their headline "Obama's Katrina" said it all. Shame. There was a constructive way for them to make recommendations about how help can be better provided and then there was a partisan political way. They chose the latter.

    As someone who has been both to Haiti and who has worked with relief groups in numerous disaster areas, I might advise the three doctors that Third World countries in the midst of unspeakable suffering don't always work with the same efficiency as your home hospitals, where you expect to be treated as Gods.

The opinions expressed here are the views of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of News Medical.
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