Partners in Health

“PIH Doctor Helps Train Next Generation of Haitian Physicians”

“PIH Doctor Helps Train Next Generation of Haitian Physicians”

Dr. Michelle Morse, MD MPH has recently been receiving notoriety amongst the global health community for her exemplary efforts in Haiti. She is the co-founder of Physicians for Haiti, an NGO that aims to improve the quality of medical education for the next generation of Haitian health professionals. Dr. Morse is also an active contributor to the Core’s partner-NGO, Partners in Health, where she serves as the deputy medical director for Haiti. Dr. Michelle Morse also devotes her time at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Harvard. The Global Health Core is proud to see Dr. Morse’s work being brought to the fore-front by the following article from Partners in Health: (more…)

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Building Something Like a Movement in Global Health: Lessons from St. Marc Hospital, Haiti.

Our goal is to create a beloved community and 

this will require a qualitative change in our souls 

as well as a quantitative change in our lives.

~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We see difficult things here. This is true. One of our patients is a prisoner who was brought to our hospital yesterday. The guard who brought him in shackles him to the metal part of the bed, and then disappears. We have no way to unshackle him. The prisoner is confused, with a very high fever. His right ankle is shackled to the bed, and his body rotates like a door around the hinge which is his ankle. In his confusion he rotates off the bed and face plants into the not so clean floor. We lift him up and the nursing staff attempts to change the sheets that are soiled. They are inevitably soiled far faster and more efficiently than any response this hospital can muster. (more…)

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Medicine is Universal
Dr. Sriram Shamasunder in Haiti

Medicine is Universal

Dr. Pierre, Haitian ZL Leader teaching rounds in Hinche, Haiti with our fellow Robin Tittle.
Dr. Pierre, Haitian ZL Leader teaching rounds in Hinche, Haiti with our fellow Robin Tittle.

“Medicine is universal.”

     This is a phrase that Dr. Pierre, one of my Haitian colleagues here in Hinche, uses frequently. What he means is that medical conditions and the treatments they require do not actually differ between a low resource setting like central Haiti and a hospital like University of California, San Francisco. Of course, some diagnoses here (malaria, leptospirosis, cholera) are rarely encountered on the wards of American hospitals. In addition, we must remember that illness is often shaped by political, social, and economic inequities. But the fundamentals of disease are the same; the human body doesn’t know that it was born across the border. (more…)

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