Contact:
Eric Sommer
(718) 250 8325
April 23, 2010 – The New York metropolitan area, particularly those neighborhoods served by The Brooklyn Hospital Center, has the second largest population of Haitians in America. So when a 7.3 earthquake struck Haiti this January, the reverberations were felt here strongly. As a recent poll indicated, three-fifths of all Haitian Americans had either lost a loved one or had a loved one that had been injured or made homeless by the tragedy.
TBHC responded quickly. Less than 48 hours after the earthquake, Drs. Valerie Brutus, Stephen S. Carryl and Louisdon Pierre flew to Haiti to perform emergency surgeries on disaster victims at the Adventist Hospital in Port-au-Prince’s Diquini neighborhood. TBHC’s director of Neonatal Intensive Care, Dr. Patrick Leblanc, made several trips to Haiti since the earthquake, supervising with Dr. Pierre the building of a NICU and PICU at Adventist.
Captions:
Dr. Patrick Leblanc, director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at The Brooklyn Hospital Center, hands out to treats to kids living in a tent set up in the front yard of the hospital. Several of these children were orphaned or lost a limb the earthquake.
Haitian child being treated in a NICU created by Drs. Leblanc, Pierre and Kioko as well as biomedical technician Harrold Joseph.
They worked heroically in the face of impossible conditions. According to Dr. Carryl, The Brooklyn Hospital Center’s chief of surgery, “The earthquake rattled the hospital’s foundation so we had to treat some patients on the courtyard. Beds had to be set up on concrete walkways, gravel roads and even bare earth where many patients had to spend that first weekend.”
Struggling with more than just a lack of operating rooms, the surgeons had to perform amputations and other procedures with substandard equipment, often without sufficient sedation or anesthesia.
But despite all this they were able to perform numerous life-saving and limb-saving procedures, including many on young children. “We’re proud of the care we were able to provide, but the more we accomplished the more we realized how much still needs to be done,” said Dr. Pierre, a specialist in pediatric and critical care medicine, referring to the ongoing need for basic wound care, skin grafts, physical and occupational rehabilitation, and trauma therapy.
Drs. Brutus, Carryl, Leblanc and Pierre—and other TBHC personnel such as pediatric resident Dr. Marilyn Kioko, biomedical technician Harrold Joseph and Dr. Emmanuel St. Louis, vice chair of Family Medicine—have returned and will continue returning to Haiti to provide services and equipment.
“We will continue reaching out to the victims of Haiti for the weeks and months to come,” said Dr. Richard M. Becker, president and CEO of The Brooklyn Hospital Center. “Our physicians and staff were among the first to arrive in Haiti and we continue to provide assistance in every way possible.”
