"A Ray of Hope in Haiti" - The Importance of Reviving America's Health Care Infrastructure

I was so happy to hear that the Zanmi Lasante Hospital escaped "relatively undamaged" according to a report by Michelle Goldberg with the Daily Beast, "A Ray of Hope in Haiti". 

I have followed the work of Paul Farmer since I first read about his efforts in Bill Clinton's "Giving."

What a blessing that some very forward thinking individuals were already organizing to upgrade the health care in one of the poorest regions of Haiti when this earthquake struck.  My partner spent quite a bit of time in Haiti during the embargo years, and has a deep respect for the spirit of Haitians.

According to Ms. Goldberg,

He [Paul Farmer] founded Zanmi Lasante in the 1980s, while he was still at Harvard Medical School, eventually building it from a two-room clinic into a full-service hospital with a network of satellite clinics and home health visitors. Altogether, it serves more than two million people. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and Cange, the town where Zanmi Lasante was founded, is one of poorest parts of Haiti. Yet the care provided at the hospital is, by all accounts, excellent. It is also largely free. No one is turned away for lack of funds; support comes from Partners in Health, the Boston-based NGO that Farmer co-founded. As he told The New York Times, “For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.”

The current level of health care in England, Germany and other European countries came to be in part by the devastating toll on humanity brought about by the relentless bombing campaigns of World War II.  Millions of walking wounded flooded the already overtaxed hospitals in England and Europe.  The governments of those countries affected most by the destruction had little choice but to establish a health care system capable of addressing the overwhelming needs of a post war society.

I hope this article helps bring into perspective the importance of a solid health care infrastructure in a society, and how teamwork and proper planning can make it possible even with limited resources and funds.  So much has been said and written regarding the potential cost of reorganizing our own health care infrastructure, yet the cost of not doing so can be seen in the faces of survivors of Hurricane Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami and Haitian survivors of the quake who came to realize that surviving the initial catastrophes was only the beginning of their struggles. 

My thoughts and prayers go with the volunteer nurses from California who are organizing to fly to Haiti to care for the sick and wounded.

For more information the Zanmi Lasante Hospital I recommend this article by Christine Welter.