Haiti Rehabilitation Centre

Since the 2010 earthquake, we have been lucky to have international partners that send teams of volunteers to our Haiti Rehabilitation Unit. The idea of these partnerships is to perform continuous and ongoing training of our Haitian staff, but also to give medical professionals from other countries the chance to experience working in a developing country’s setting.

Over the past 3 weeks, we’ve had a team from Switzerland come to work alongside our rehabilitation staff here at our hospital. A main goal was to fit and adapt patients’ wheelchairs, such as that of Wilmanice, a resident at our respite home for children with disabilities.

Her wheelchair was not much more than a stroller before, but has now been adapted with new equipment so she can sit more upright and more comfortably. This small change can make a huge difference to their independence and confidence in social situations.

The visiting team are also teaching specific topics chosen by our Haitian staff, as well as “just” working along side each other and learning new things from one another. 4 wheelchairs were re-adapted completely, one of our in-patients got different auxiliary materials adapted to his disability and new assessments were introduced.

This often leads to a lot of questions from both sides, which were discussed thoroughly in order for everyone benefit from them. It is great to see the connection between Haitian and international staff, especially when teams, such as our Swiss friends, visit regularly and build long term partnerships. Thank you for supporting this pioneering work in Haiti.

Links:

• HHA disability care work

As mentioned many times in our reports, education is the key to success in our rehabilitation unit in Haiti. 

During the summer months, we usually see less patients in our out-patient clinic which gives us more time to focus on advancing our staff. We have introduced new assessments into our admissions/discharge process and are training our staff on how to use them. This will make it possible for us to better track and calculate our patient outcomes. It will help us see where we stand compared to other rehabilitation units in the country but also compared to international partners. We have also had different volunteers teach our physical therapists how to improve their therapeutic skills to be able to treat our patients even better.

But at our hospital, we do not only focus on our own staff. We partner with different schools from the area, specifically nursing and therapy, and host their students during their internships in our different departments.

Because rehabilitation medecine is still very new to the Haitian medical system, it is even more important that these young professionals learn about what we do. They are the ones making the difference when it comes to finding new patients and referring them and also passing on their knowledge to their peers.

Thank you so much for your support. 

Links:

• HHA disability care work