For the people of St. Suzanne, a medical clinic is the closet thing they will see to a hospital. The clinic is where they can find people with some level of medical training and some level of medical supplies. Unfortunately, the treatment experience can vary widely. Staffing is usually thin,with only one doctor and one nurse. If either must go to a critically ill person away from the clinic, it means more patients for just one person.
Medicine is available, but again the treatment coverage of a clinic's medical inventory is usually quite limited. To a certain extent this limitation is due to budget, but to another it is due to the fact that there's usually no ability to store medicines under controlled temperature conditions.
Existing Services
Currently, the medical clinic at St. Suzanne offers the services of three examining rooms, one doctor, one nurse and a small storage room for its inventory of medicine. Villagers are expected to pay some fee for treatment if they are able, however, no one is turned away if even a small payment is not possible.
Challenges
Although a doctor has been hired for the clinic, there still is no one at the clinic with dental skills, nor is there any one with optical skills so that eye glass prescriptions could be made and matched against donated eyeware. In addition, there is no one available with lab technician skills who could run diagnostic tests on clinic patients.
Goals
HBHH has two main goals for the medical clinic at St. Suzanne: one is to increase the treatment capabilities available at the clinic and the other is to be able to bring medical services to people in remote villages that otherwise could not get to the medical care.
Because the nearest hospital is so far away, roads are so bad and vehicles so scarce, it would make a huge difference to the level of medical care at the clinic if it had a lab that could run tests for the doctor and the nurses. In order to make that possible, the clinic will need to: establish a reliable source of power to run laboratory equiment; locate, acquire and ship the necessary equipment; find and sponsor a qualified laboratory technician and purchase the needed supplies so that tests can be conducted. Another upgrade in medical care would be to equip a room with dental equipment so that a Haitian dentist could be hired to make monthly visits to the clinic, where that room could be used as his treatment center.
Although the mountain roads around the village of St. Suzanne are quite bad, another HBHH goal is to equip a vehicle as a mobile medical clinic so that the services of the doctor and the nurses can be brought to the sick. Even though hundreds of people were treated at the last medical mission, those were only the people who could either walk long distances or had family members and friends that could help them make the trip. Many more people knew of the medical clinic but could not leave their beds to take advantage of it. A mobile clinic would help to minimize the situation of sick people being beyond the reach of heathcare. HBHH knows the value of having a mobile clinic, because we have partnered with Caritas, with our doctor providing services for their mobile clinic one day a week.