These last couple of months have seen a steady stream of visiting teams coming to Cap and working in various member clinics. Pat Sedlak brought a team of lecturers, dentists and nursing students who provided much needed dental services to residents of Limonade and Shada, as well as supporting Dr Junior at the Cap Haitien Dental Institute at Justinien Hospital. The lecturers and nursing students provided training sessions and helped out in the maternity and paediatric wards at Justinien Hospital. Max supported them greatly, including organising a trip to Cymas in Limonade, to visit a very poorly supported group of orphans. The team very kindly donated a large bag of rice and oil, cake and toys to the group of single mothers caring for these children, who sang wonderful words of liberation in return.
Patricia Eddie brought a medical team to work at St Suzanne, and Mary Larkin to Jakzi, Roche Platt and Pilette, who Juline fully supported, including providing translation services. Juline is currently supporting Dr Ford's mission team working in Tovar. Having gained experience working with myself as a physio, she was able to identify and refer a new stroke patient to the Haiti Hospital Appeal Rehab Centre, and the visiting team gave the patient money to cover her expenses.
Floating Doctors also finally made it to the North Coast and have been busy working in the most needy areas. After working in Shada, they moved on to Labadi and Bay D'Acul. They have returned to Labadi due to the large amounts of acutely unwell patients there. From large numbers of infections, to providing follow up on post surgical cases, even to shark attacks! They flagged up so many cases that would benefit from physio, that we organised an outreach and triage service from Haiti Hospital Appeal, seeing 20 patients during the doctors' clinic. Floating Doctors have also brought a large amount of medical supplies, donated by DRI which are currently being distributed by our team.
Supplies continue to be acquired and distributed at a steady rate. DRI, Bahamas Habitat, Clean the World and IOM have all been providing life saving medical and hygiene materials. We are also working with Grass Roots United to allow us to pre position cholera supplies in anticipation of the next wave, which MSF estimates will be mid May, the start of mango season.
The Network Team continue to visit our members organisations and support them the best we can. Over the last two months we have visited over 20 members, 3 organisations have joined the network, and greater relationships have been built with many of our existing members. We continue to have a presence at the health and WASH (water and sanitisation and hygiene) cluster meetings, and introduce new members to them, including SIFAT and Living Water.
We are continuing to improve coordination between water NGOs and have been mainly working with DINEPA (governmental organisation), Oxfam, SIFAT, Living Water and Konbit Sante to improve their collaboration.
I am also continuing to support the Haiti Hospital Appeal Rehab Unit by providing training to the therapists, new nurses and nursing students, working with the therapists to implement the documentation, and to work with the multi disciplinary team to facilitate service improvements. I have also been involved with the validation of the new SEIPH guidelines on working on improving access to healthcare and rehab for people with disabilities. Being a member of the network team has been valuable in helping promote Haiti Hospital Appeal's new rehab service to clinics, services and visiting teams across the region.
We look forward to Julian joining the Network Support Team at the end of May which we hope will broaden the scope of our work and how we can support our members. Hannah Steadman
Cap Haitien Health Network
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