Other Clinical Collaborations

Building Supportive Partnerships

While Konbit Sante's most intensive initiatives are based in the areas of women's health, child health, and public health, we also support and facilitate a variety of other clinical collaborations between professionals in Haiti and volunteers in the U.S. These collaborations often involve conducting trainings for health providers in Haiti, sponsoring Haitian colleagues to come to the U.S. for training, and acquiring requested material resources.

Volunteer physicians train internal medicine staff to use an EKG machine.Our longest collaboration is with Internal Medicine in which we support Dr. Michel Pierre, Internal Medicine Educator, who leads the residency program in Medicine and provides hands-on care at Justinian University Hospital. In the summer of 2010, endocrinologist Dr. John Devlin, (a board member and volunteer) began implementing a diabetes treatment program, funded by a grant awarded to Maine Medical Center by the International Diabetes Federation. In an effort to increase the quality and effectiveness of care that diabetes patients receive, Konbit Sante has hired a diabetes nurse and two community health workers to add capacity to the diabetes clinic at Justinian.

Our surgical collaboration, built on the foundation of a long-established urology partnership, is growing, based on needs highlighted by the 2010 earthquake. During that winter, U.S. volunteers with specialities in orthopedic surgery, surgical nursing, and wound care traveled to assess the situation, develop partnerships with their Haitian counterparts, and identify opportunities for feasible interventions. As a result of this analysis, Konbit Sante hired a wound care nurse specialist, Manucha Alcime, in the summer of 2010 whose role is to provide assistance and training to the staff at the emergency services and surgery departments. Manucha was able to come to Maine for a full month of further training in the September 2010.

An assessment of the Emergency Medicine service was conducted by U.S. volunteers in collaboration with Haitian colleagues in 2007. Since that time the committee worked to devise a building renovation and expansion plan that would improve patient flow, clinical care and the capacity of the staff to respond effectively to emergency and disaster situations. In addition, the team is helping develop protocols, train staff on triage and other patient management skills, promote infection control measures, and coordinate with other NGO's efforts to strengthen the ER service.

Our mental health collaboration, which began with periodic teaching of subjects of interest to clinicians in family medicine and internal medicine, is expanding with an important new collaboration with Action Sanitaire. This group (ACSA) is a grass-roots Haitian organization committed to serving impoverished communities by organizing mobile clinics that visit under-served neighborhoods on a rotating basis. Following the earthquake, addressing post-traumatic stress, depression, and other metal health issues is especially important.

Nurses in the U.S. travel to Haiti to conduct trainings at the nursing school as well as at various services within Justinian Hospital. They host visiting colleagues who come to train in a variety of specialties Volunteer from Clean-O-Rama teaches hopsital cleaners how to use new productsincluding nursing school curriculum development, pediatric nursing, and post-surgical wound care. With the support of GOJO Industries and the Pan American Health Education Foundation, the nursing team implemented an infection control project that promoted proper handwashing using Purell. During the six months following the intervention in January 2009, Purell usage at Justinian increased 100 percent! Later, in the fall of 2009 Konbit Sante purchased cleaning supplies that were requested by the chief of nursing, also as part of the infection control project. The Maine-based company, Clean-O-Rama, from whom we purchased these materials generously sent a staff member to Haiti as a volunteer to conduct trainings for the cleaning staff on how to properly use the materials.