Nowhere is PIH/ZL’s commitment to building back better more evident than in the construction of a 180,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art teaching hospital in Mirebalais, a city approximately 35 miles north of Port-au-Prince.
Nowhere is PIH/ZL’s commitment to building back better
more evident than in the construction of a 180,000-square-foot,
state-of-the-art teaching hospital in Mirebalais, a city approximately
35 miles north of Port-au-Prince.
In late 2008, the existing and inadequate hospital in Mirebalais
closed after the agency that had been operating it stopped providing
services, leaving 140,000 local residents without essential medical
care. The Haitian Ministry of Health (MOH) asked PIH/ZL to step in and
fill the gap. We accepted and in early 2009, we began drawing up plans
for a new hospital to address the health needs of the community.
The destruction of 80 percent of Haiti’s health care infrastructure
on January 12, 2010, made the need for a hospital in Mirebalais more
urgent than ever. As the gateway into the Central Plateau, Mirebalais
occupies a strategic location for treating the thousands of displaced
persons who are still streaming into the rural Central and Artibonite
departments from Port-au-Prince. Starting in February, PIH/ZL’s team of
architects and engineers went back to the drawing board, modifying their
plans in order to make the new facility a national referral and
teaching hospital featuring state-of-the-art clinical design and green
technology.
When it opens its doors at the end of 2011, the Mirebalais hospital
will be the largest public hospital outside of the capital city. The new
hospital will have 320 beds—equivalent in capacity to all 12 of
PIH/ZL's existing hospitals in Haiti combined—and will offer clinical
facilities not currently available at any public site in Haiti,
including an intensive care unit and an operating theater complex with
six operating rooms.
Not only were many of the health care facilities in and around
Port-au-Prince destroyed in the earthquake, an entire class of 150
nursing students perished beneath the rubble of Haiti’s collapsed
nursing school. The only teaching hospital in the country, the capital
city’s General Hospital-l’Hopital de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti
(HUEH)-was badly damaged and its educational facilities destroyed.
Working in partnership with the Ministry of Health, Harvard Medical
School and its teaching hospital Brigham and Women’s, Dartmouth Medical
School, and Duke Medical School, PIH/ZL hopes to reinvigorate medical
education in Haiti by making Mirebalais Hospital a major teaching
hospital – one that provides quality medical education to nurses,
medical students, and resident physicians.
While it will not replace the central teaching hospital, which will
take years to rebuild and repair, the hospital in Mirebalais will
supplement efforts at HUEH and contribute to the national goal
of decentralizing public services, including both clinical care and
medical education.
