When Dr. Ofer Merin and his medical team arrived in Haiti, they were met by hundreds of patients.
Dr. Ofer Merin
Haiti relief fundraising
Some had chest injuries, others had open wounds, but one thing was clear.
“If they’re not treated, they’ll die,” Merin, the chief of the Israel Defence Forces field hospital in Haiti, said in an exclusive phone interview from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Merin is in charge of some 120 IDF nurses, physicians and medics, one of the largest medical units in Haiti at this time. His unit arrived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, three days after the country was hit by the strongest earthquake it has experienced in 200 years.
The death count in Haiti has yet to be finalized. The European Union estimates that it’s reached 200,000 since the earthquake struck on Jan. 12, with two million left homeless.
Merin’s team left Israel on Jan. 15.
“We had meetings all day [Jan. 13]. The preliminary plan was I’d fly with an army plane to Haiti the same night… Then [the IDF] decided to send a big medical mission,” he said.
Merin’s medical team was joined by about 120 rescue workers on the 14-hour flight to Haiti. They landed in Port-au-Prince on the afternoon of Jan. 15, but had to wait for a separate cargo plane packed with medical equipment to arrive before setting up the field hospital.
“The cargo plane landed at four in the morning, [and] we started to build up the hospital. By 10 a.m. [Jan. 16], we received the first patients,” Merin said.
While flying to Haiti, Merin and his team talked logistics. Upon arrival, they were shocked.
“There were hundreds and hundreds of wounded people on the streets,” he said, adding that patients began to line up before the hospital had been set up.
Merin’s days start early, at about 5 a.m., and although they’re supposed to end at 12 a.m., it’s hard to turn down a patient.
“I’m just up all the time, patients come in the day, evening, night. They just keep on coming,” Merin said. “We are overwhelmed with patients.”
The field hospital often sees more than 100 people every day and performs around 50 surgeries per day. Most patients have to wait up to 10 hours for what could be life-saving treatment.
Merin, who is a surgeon at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem and who worked in a Toronto hospital for several years, says many of the injuries are orthopedic, such as fractures and open wounds. Those with more serious injuries probably died before they could be treated, he said.
When Merin landed in Haiti, he found unique challenges.
“The hospital… is a reserve hospital, which is meant for… soldiers. It doesn’t have any people treating any children, illnesses, women giving birth,” he said, adding that experts and equipment were brought in for the mission.
Apart from healing wounds and binding broken bones, the hospital has helped about 10 women give birth as of last Thursday. Merin is also seeing patients as a result of local violence. By last Thursday, the hospital had treated about seven or eight people with gunshot wounds.
The hospital, which has an emergency room, a neonatal unit for newborns, X-ray machines and blood-test labs, has begun to see more repeat patients, but it doesn’t have the resources to treat many in-patients, Merin said.
“We’re working in a very different environment than any of us are used to. We’re getting patients that we would keep for days [in regular hospitals]. We’re doing our best to discharge them,” he said. “We cannot afford to keep too many in-patients. We can manage 40. We’re getting 50 or 60. We can not go beyond these numbers.”
After the first three or four days, the field hospital started to run out of equipment.
“No one thought we’d [see] those numbers [of patients],” Merin said, adding that staff was sent to the city’s abandoned hospitals to gather more supplies.
“There was no point of time since we came here that we didn’t… treat people because of a shortage of equipment,” he said.
Since the initial earthquake, there have been several aftershocks, the largest of which was a 6.1 magnitude quake that hit about 56 kilometres from Port-au-Prince. While Merin’s field hospital wasn’t affected, he has seen several patients who were.
Merin doesn’t know how much longer his unit will stay in Haiti, but he knows why he’s there.
“To help people in need,” he said.
