When a massive earthquake rocked Haiti on August 14, more than 650,000 people were left in need of emergency humanitarian assistance, while more than half of healthcare facilities were damaged or destroyed. At the request of the Haitian government, International Medical Corps staff and volunteers deployed our Emergency Medical Team (EMT) Fixed Type 1 facility—a multi-tent field hospital, accompanied by a team of clinical and emergency response experts—to Aquin, on Haiti’s southwest coast, in early September. This is the story of how a team of medical volunteers worked with two local nurses, our security and logistics teams, and one local hospital to save a 16-day-old baby.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that 22,000 women in Haiti will give birth in the next three months. Thanks to the earthquake and the damage it caused to healthcare infrastructure in the country, thousands of women have already gone without prenatal and post-natal care and given birth at home without a trained medical professional. Such was the case for a woman who came to our field hospital in mid-September with an extremely malnourished infant.
