Dr. Robert Fuller, head of emergency medicine at the Health Center, is in Haiti as a physician-volunteer with the International Medical Corps’ Emergency Response Team. Fuller is accompanied by Matt Howe, a graduate of the UConn emergency medicine program.
Fuller is among those working to get the Port-au-Prince General Hospital up and running but it’s not an easy task. “This hospital only had capacity for 700 patients when it was fully operational,” he says, “and there’s nearly 1,500 patients sitting outside waiting for care, so it’s very tricky to try and squeeze all of those patients into a place that couldn’t fit them to begin with.”
The team is treating crush injuries, trauma, basic wound care, shock, and other critical cases. Doctors are reportedly doing 20 amputations a day. Medical supplies, such as IV’s, pain medicines, and bandages are extremely limited.
Fuller is not a novice when it comes to disaster relief efforts. In another International Medical Corps mission, he traveled to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after a tsunami killed 300,000 people in December 2004. Fuller was the interim director of emergency medicine in a clinic there for one month.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Fuller was part of the medical response team from the Health Center that assisted in the efforts at ground zero in New York City. Over its 24 hours of service, the team offered specialized rescue/medical care and assisted in the search and rescue efforts.
Although it did not follow a disaster, Fuller took a sabbatical from the Health Center last year to work in Ecuador. He provided his emergency medicine expertise in an inner-city hospital in the country’s biggest city, Guayaquil, whose patients are mostly the poor and underserved.
The International Medical Corps is a volunteer group based in the United States that responds to disasters throughout the world and then helps local communities develop the infrastructure for health care.
Fuller is expected to be in Haiti for two weeks.
Video clip
The following clip from the International Medical Corps’ YouTube channel shows Dr. Fuller being interviewed by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer from the Situation Room, discussing the difficulties of providing medical care after Haiti’s devastating earthquake.
