For our next sum­mary of the res­cue efforts in Haiti we are going to focus on the work of Médecins Sans Fron­tières. The med­ical aid orga­ni­za­tion is strug­gling to heal sur­vivors in Port-au-Prince. It’s is a gar­gan­tuan task, for the earth­quake destroyed all of the city’s hos­pi­tals, includ­ing those oper­ated by MSF.

First, an inter­view with MSF oper­a­tions man­ager for Haiti Dr. Greg Elder.

MSF already had resources on the ground, func­tion­ing med­ical facil­i­ties in Haiti. Are these med­ical facil­i­ties still func­tion­ing, and how are you get­ting more resources in?

We have three hos­pi­tal structures—a trauma cen­ter and a mater­nity hos­pi­tal included—and nearly 800 staff on the ground in Port-au-Prince. Those facil­i­ties struc­turally had been so badly dam­aged we had to evac­u­ate patients out of those facil­i­ties onto the neigh­bor­ing grounds. But we’ve been able to set up some tented first-aid cen­ters dur­ing the day today. Those cen­ters obvi­ously have been over­whelmed, exhausted already. Our teams have treated more than 1,000 wounded peo­ple, includ­ing open frac­tures and other injuries, at our makeshift facil­i­ties in the capital.

In Port-au-Prince the health sys­tem is rather frag­ile and the hos­pi­tals we vis­ited dur­ing the evening and dur­ing the day on Wednes­day have been over­whelmed. So we are try­ing to fill a gap in the short-term and then rein­force our teams by dis­patch­ing another 70 inter­na­tional staff over the next few days, includ­ing sev­eral sur­gi­cal teams. A char­ter flight will leave on Thurs­day with all the equip­ment nec­es­sary to estab­lish a 100-bed inflat­able tent hos­pi­tal with two oper­at­ing rooms. Two sur­gi­cal teams are leav­ing from Miami, Florida, on Thurs­day morn­ing to pro­vide some addi­tional sup­port on the ground.

Can you give us a sense of the scope of this damage?

Port-au-Prince is a very con­gested city with a high pop­u­la­tion and a rel­a­tively poor infra­struc­ture. Before the earth­quake, Port-au-Prince, a city of 3.5 mil­lion peo­ple of which half live in slums, had 21 pub­lic health facil­i­ties includ­ing four hos­pi­tals. The pub­lic health sys­tem was mar­gin­ally func­tional before this dis­as­ter and is not able to cope with an emer­gency of this mag­ni­tude, and it will depend on inter­na­tional sup­port and inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions to be able to fill the gap.

So it’s a really cat­a­strophic event where absolutely no one knows really what the scope of this is in terms of casu­al­ties and fatal­i­ties. It will be some time before any­one can tell that because peo­ple are buried under the rubble.

Dr. Elder was inter­viewed on last night’s PBS News Hour.

Finally an arti­cle on the inflat­able hos­pi­tals that MSF is installing in Port-au-Prince to tem­porar­ily replace their downed structures.

More than 1,000 patients have received care in the four tented facil­i­ties MSF set up near the dam­aged build­ings in which it had been work­ing. The pri­mary con­cern at the moment is the over­whelm­ing num­bers of peo­ple who need imme­di­ate treat­ment and major surgery. An MSF team is begin­ning to work in the oper­at­ing the­ater of a major pub­lic hos­pi­tal in the capital’s Cite Soleil dis­trict, while other MSF staff are try­ing to iden­tify addi­tional med­ical struc­tures that remain intact.

An inflat­able MSF field hos­pi­tal, equipped with two oper­at­ing the­atres, is expected to arrive by air in the next 24 hours. Cru­cial per­son­nel, includ­ing sur­geons and anes­thetists, and sup­ple­men­tary stocks of med­ical sup­plies are on the way as well.

Food, water and shel­ter mate­ri­als are all in short sup­ply, how­ever. “Basic pro­vi­sions were always prob­lem­atic for peo­ple in Port-au-Prince but the posi­tion is far worse now,” said Vin­cent Hoedt, one of MSF’s emer­gency coor­di­na­tors. “And obvi­ously there’s a con­cern for peo­ple who are already weak­ened by injuries. There are also short­ages of things like gaso­line, which affects the work­ing of all kinds of vital equipment.”

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