Healing Hands for Haiti Joins Continuing Promise 2011

Aug. 22, 2011 - PRLog -- Port-au-Prince, Haiti (August 22, 2011) The Continuing Promise 2011 is visiting Haiti as its ninth and final stop on a five-month humanitarian assistance mission providing medical, dental, veterinary and engineering support to the Caribbean Basin and Central and South America. Since its arrival to Port-au-Prince on August 18th, the USNS Comfort has triaged approximately 1450 patients and performed 15 surgeries. The USNS Comfort is a Medical Treatment Facility providing mobile, flexible, responsive afloat medical and surgical care.

Healing Hands for Haiti International (HHHI http://www.healinghandsforhaiti.org) has sent Country Medical Doctor, Dr. Bernard Nau to assist Dr. Todd, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon, with the screening of seven HHHI referred patients in need of surgery.  All seven patients were accepted and Dr. Nau will assist with the surgery. Follow up and rehabilitation services will be provided at Healing Hands Kay Kapab Klinik in Port-au-Prince.  

In addition to orthopedic surgery, Healing Hands Klinik Director, Fiona Stephenson, is making efforts to have some spinal cord injured (SCI) receive urology consults. Healing Hands Country Director, Al Ingersoll, has volunteered to meet any prosthetic and orthotic needs of the patients.  Yasmine Edouard, one of HHHI’s interpreters will spend 7 – 10 days living on the ship helping with translation / interpretation of the complex medical needs. A very great collaboration we are proud of!

Operations were temporarily suspended on August 21st in anticipation of severe weather from Hurricane Irene expected to make landfall in Hispaniola between Monday evening (22nd) and Tuesday morning (23rd). The Comfort will seek safe haven until the storm has passed.

Healing Hands for Haiti International is a non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to delivering quality, sustainable physical medicine and rehabilitation education, training  and care for adults and children with physical disabilities in Haiti. They believe the best way to serve the people of Haiti is to empower them to help themselves.

To follow the ships visit, go to Continuing Promise 2011 (see link below) and to learn more about Healing Hands for Haiti visit their website at http://www.healinghandsforhaiti.org.

Continuing Promise 2011: http://www.facebook.com/navycp#!/notes/continuing-promise...
USNS Comfort: http://www.med.navy.mil/sites/usnscomfort/Pages/default.aspx

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Healing Hands for Haiti is dedicated to fostering the expansion of quality rehabilitation services and programs for the benefit of Haitian adults and children with physical and mental disabilities.