Dr. Francoise Jusma with one of many patients with leg injuries.
	Dr. Roger Grannum treats a man injured in an aftershock.
	Patients receive IV fluids by improvised means.
	Dr. Yolande Thomas reaches for medicine at the supply table.
	Dr. Miroslawa Rubaj of Woodhull (seated) and a volunteer nurse treating infants.
	People searching in the rubble of a building near the emergency medical clinic.
	Photos: Christian Hand

People with broken bones protruding through the skin. Others shaking with fever from infection. Babies with pneumonia, diabetics without insulin, patients whose asthma had worsened because of dust and debris. People suffering from dehydration.

Those were some of the injuries and maladies that Dr. Francoise Jusma and six of her colleagues from Woodhull Hospital treated during a trip to Port-au-Prince, Haiti recently to care for victims of the devastating earthquake on Jan. 12. They were part of a team of 27 doctors, nurses, physician assistants and translators from Woodhull and several private New York medical facilities who traveled to Haiti with a non-profit organization founded by Dr. Jusma.

They treated people who had not seen a doctor since being injured in the quake two weeks before. Some people were so happy to be alive they didn't seem to realize just how sick they were, said Dr. Jusma, who is Haitian.

"People lived through the earthquake and they saw people die or half-dead, and if they have a broken leg but they can hop on the other foot they think they're OK."

Dr. Jusma goes to Haiti periodically to run a medical clinic for the poor with Christian Hand, a group she founded in 2005 in memory of her mother. She planned to go this year in March, but the quake changed that. Instead the group went the last week of January. This week the Haitian government said the quake's estimated death toll has risen to 230,000 people.

Medical personnel from throughout HHC have gone to Haiti on their own since the tragedy. Two doctors from Metropolitan Hospital, De Latre Lolo and Ronald Shaw, and a resident, William Claire, were in Haiti Jan. 20-26 as part of a medical group organized by actor Sean Penn's Jenkins-Penn Haitian Relief Organization on a mission sponsored by Donna Karan and the Urban Zen Foundation.

HHC has recruited other medical volunteers but is waiting to send a team until government authorities and those coordinating relief efforts on the ground say they can accept such assistance. Here, HHC has: established a Haiti Relief Fund through the HHC Foundation and made it possible for employees to donate through payroll deduction; set up a 24/7 hotline at Kings County Hospital to provide counseling for Haitians; and established legal clinics with its non-profit partner LegalHealth at Kings County and Bellevue hospitals to help Haitian immigrants apply for Temporary Protected Status, with similar legal assistance planned at Elmhurst, Queens and Jacobi Hospitals.

Dr. Jusma and her group slept in sleeping bags in the yard of La Lumiere radio station and set up their medical clinic in the lot of the church next door. They dispensed antibiotics, pain medication and asthma medication. They gave patients IV fluids to hydrate them. They dressed wounds and set broken bones.

There were no ambulances so they paid for cabs to transport patients to the hospital. They wrote out physician referral forms longhand on paper. They experienced several aftershocks.

One night they cooked rice, beans and chicken, and distributed 500 meals at a tent city nearby. It ran out quickly. "The need is so vast," said Dr. Jusma, who hopes to go back later this year.

"We helped a lot of people but there's so much more to be done," said Aser Denis, a certified medical assistant from Woodhull. Others who journeyed from Woodhull are: Dr. Yolande Thomas; Dr. Miroslawa Rubaj; Dr. Carole DuBuche; Dr. Roger Grannum; and Gerd St. Germain, a physician assistant.

February 2010