News Article

Visitation Hospital Foundation realizing success in Haiti

Jack Murphree, Tennessee Register

Despite Haiti’s ongoing problems – near-constant political upheaval, limping economic recovery from the 2010 earthquake, a barrage of hurricanes and waning international sympathy for its enduring troubles – one Nashville-based foundation is making real strides in Haitian healthcare and setting itself among the success stories in rural Haitian communities.

Visitation Hospital, located in Petite Riviere de Nippes, 70 miles west of Haiti’s capital Port au Prince, is a walk-in clinic that treats between 50-100 Haitians everyday, dispensing health and pharmacological care to every patient regardless of condition or financial capacity.

“We charge $1.20 per patient,” said Art Judy, executive director of the Visitation Hospital Foundation. “And if they can not afford that then we treat them anyway.”

Nearly 80 percent of the 55,000 patients Visitation Hospital has cared for since it opened in 2008 are women and children, and their goal is to provide them with competent and compassionate health care as well as resources to pursue their basic right to health and health education.

“The people want us there and they are energized by what we are doing – bringing first world practice and technology and impacting overall health and the spirit of the region,” said Judy.

“The local politicians support our efforts because we are uniting rural Haiti by eliminating serious widespread health problems,” he said.

“If you commit to long-term engagement in Haiti, the people will respond,” said Judy, a scientist, technologist and business manager who began his third world work as a volunteer in 1997.

Visitation Hospital is staffed by local medical practitioners and support staff and systematically sustains itself. “There is no power grid to plug into,” said Judy. “We have our own solar panels that generate electricity and our own tower and pressure pump that provide water to the facility.”

The 4,000 square foot clinic was designed by Nashville-based architect Alan Dooley, a principal architect at Dooley and Associates. “It looks much like the inside of a typical emergency ward,” said Dooley. “There are curtain tracks instead of walls and lots of open space to allow air flow since there is no air conditioning system,” he said.

One of the Visitation Hospital Foundation’s immediate goals is to transform the clinic into a fully support-staffed hospital offering round-the-clock, in-patient care, including emergency surgery.

“We want to crossover to a reference hospital where other facilities refer their patients for the next level of care,” said Judy.

Because the 2010 earthquake was so catastrophic to the region, engineers have started to evaluate the entire country’s seismic risks, according to Judy.

“Geological surveys that determine earthquake fault zones and mapping did not really exist before the 2010 quake. New research has shown that our clinic sits near a fault line and this has caused us to carefully evaluate our strategic plan,” said Judy.

“It’s just a matter of time before another earthquake occurs and we are grappling with how our clinic can not just sustain the stresses, but be in service to care for the Haitian people,” said Judy.

Solutions, while they may seem like aiming at a target with a blind-fold on, lie in either reinforcing walls or adopting a different set of structurally-engineered building construction specifications for future additions to the facility.

“We are advertising in national trade magazines hoping to find an engineer who will do this work and answer some key questions for us pro bono,” said Judy.

“The Clinic withstood a 6.0 Richter Scale reading with very little damage in 2010, which is considerable,” said Dooley.

“We need the facts on how the existing clinic will survive in different scenarios,” said Dooley. “It may be that the money to retro-fit might better be spent on the construction of a new building since our plan is to house non-ambulatory patients, like a hospital.”

“We can’t wait two years to find this out,” said Dooley.

One of the ongoing health care issues in Haiti is the cholera outbreak, which Haitians are contracting from contaminated water.

“There is a broken pipe feeding contaminated water into open waterways,” said Judy. “It has been broken for some time and the patients we are seeing are coming from this area.”

“It would cost almost nothing to repair and we don’t know why the government will not see that it gets fixed,” said Judy. “It’s very frustrating.”

Visitation Hospital has not been alone in its fight against disease control. According to Judy, a Belgium medical team erected a tent in January 2011 next to the Clinic and is operating a facility which cares for cholera-infected Haitians.

“They have just let us know their funding has run out and they will be leaving December 31st,” said Judy. “This will create new challenges for us.”

Remarkably, Visitation Hospital functions on an annual operating budget of $400,000, a fraction of what it would cost to run the same facility in the U.S., and it is completely subsidized by private donations.

“Ratcheting up future fundraising in a recessionary economy is challenging,” admitted Judy. A significant boost has come from Nashville philanthropist Jim Carell, who has pledged support in the form of a quarter million dollar matching grant, according to Judy. “He will match 2 to 1 what we are able to raise,” said Judy.

“People need to understand that they can still make a difference in Haiti,” he said. “We know this because nobody dies if they can just make it to our door.”

To learn more about or how to give to Visitation Hospital Foundation, go to www.visitationhospital.org. To see an aerial view of the facility via Google Earth, the clinic’s coordinates are “Visitation Clinic” lat=18.4757638889, lon=-73.22284444: