COMMUNITY CAREGIVERS 2011
Making a difference in Responding to disaster
Recognizing Minnesota’s volunteer physicians Each year, Minnesota Physician Publishing honors physicians who have volunteered medical services in recent years. In volunteer medical activities that span the globe, Minnesota’s volunteer physicians have provided medical care and medical education and expanded crosscultural skills and understanding. Their compassion, commitment, and generosity reflect
In the days following the devastating earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, medical groups from all over the world scrambled to offer assistance in different forms. One of these groups, an orthopedic practice from St. Paul, managed to get a team on the ground in Haiti just days after the earthquake, and for weeks they worked tirelessly to save lives and mend broken bodies in the Haitian capital of Port au Prince. Summit Orthopedics had a previous relationship with Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos (NPH), a charity group that runs nine orphanages in South and Central America. NPH has a children’s hospital in Port au Prince called St. Damien. When the 2010 earthquake struck, the hospital’s founder, Father Richard Frechette, called Summit orthopedic physician Peter Daly, MD, and asked him to come immediately and help with the injured people who were flooding into the hospital. Daly organized a team that flew first to the Dominican Republic, because it was impossible to fly directly into Haiti’s capital at the time, then drove overland more than 8 hours to Port au Prince. Jerome Perra, MD, a Summit Orthopedic physician who had worked with NPH before, arrived with a second group of health care workers from Summit about three weeks after the earthquake. According to Perra, that first team faced chaos when they arrived.
“At first we had no census, we had no numbers or names, it was just ‘the kid in the fourth bed of that room.’” Jerome Perra, MD
deeply held values of Minnesota’s medical community. Story by Scott Wooldridge
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MINNESOTA PHYSICIAN MARCH 2011
“This is a children’s hospital, built to hold about 120 patients, and they had 500 patients on the grounds surrounding the hospital who had been dragged in there by families, including 80 with femur fractures,” he says. Perra recalls that the first team worked around the clock, collaborating with a team of Italian physicians there. “The Italian team would run the operating room during the day from about 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the American team would take over from 5 p.m. until 2 or 3 in the morning,” he says. “They slogged day and night for the first couple of weeks. Shortly after I got there, the deci-
sion was made that we needed to slow down to some kind of controllable pace. We relied on local staff, and these people had to have a break. They had to have a chance to go home and to take care themselves, too.” By the time Perra arrived, teams of physicians were working 12 hours a day to treat earthquake casualties. “There was kind of a rotating staff of physicians and nurses coming from different aid groups in the States, and most people would just stay for five to seven days and have to leave. Every week, we had new people coming in,” he says. “At first we had no census, we had no numbers or names, it was just ‘the kid in the fourth bed of that room.’ At first we had 75 patients; by the time we left, we had it down to 25 postoperative patients because we were getting some people discharged, getting them home. But home was a tough question. How do you send somebody home when home is a tent on the side of the road? It was very difficult to find a safe place for people to go after they left the hospital.” The physician team that went to Haiti from Summit, in addition to Daly and Perra, included Paul Donahue, MD; Mike Forseth, MD; Mark Holm, MD; and Daren Wickum, MD. The team brought their own equipment and even their own food, since basic supplies were so short and the demand for incoming relief supplies was so great. The Summit physicians did amputations and after-care for amputations, applied fixators and casts to broken bones, and provided other types of surgical and medical care. Perra says the trip was difficult in some ways but he is proud of the way the team responded to the disaster. And, he says, there were some bright spots. “The children, once they got through the worst of things and weren’t in bad pain anymore, were still children,” he says. “They may have one leg amputated; they may have a big fixator sticking out of their thigh; but they still could smile and laugh and play some games. So seeing the bright faces on the children was uplifting. And the Haitian people themselves are very tough, very stoic people who put up with a lot of adversity and did amazingly well.”