{"id":9777,"date":"2010-02-01T17:00:34","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T21:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=9777"},"modified":"2011-05-31T12:40:35","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:40:35","slug":"health-center-physician-recounts-desperation-following-haiti-earthquake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2010\/02\/health-center-physician-recounts-desperation-following-haiti-earthquake\/","title":{"rendered":"Health Center Physician Recounts Desperation Following Haiti Earthquake"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Dr.<\/a>
Dr. Robert Fuller providing medical care to an earthquake survivor. Photo by Margaret Aguirre, International Medical Corps.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dr. Robert Fuller, head of emergency medicine at the UConn Health Center<\/a>, recently returned from Haiti after spending two weeks in Port-au-Prince providing emergency medical care to earthquake survivors.<\/p>\n

Fuller worked with the International Medical Corps<\/a>\u2019 Emergency Response Team triaging patients, treating crush injuries, and providing basic wound care. He was accompanied by Matt Howe, a graduate of the UConn emergency medicine program.<\/p>\n

Part of Fuller\u2019s volunteer duties included working to get the Port-au-Prince General Hospital \u2013 the biggest hospital in the city \u2013 up and running after the earthquake. But treating hundreds of seriously injured patients came first.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe triaged and touched over 100 patients the first day and there were probably five or six times that waiting to be touched,\u201d Fuller says. \u201cBut we couldn\u2019t see them all in the first day with just the small group of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were seeing patients that had escaped mortal wounds in the first days but now were suffering with crushed and extremely infected extremities,\u201d Fuller says. \u201cSo we were mostly setting up people for amputations and fixing broken bones, straightening broken limbs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did about 20 amputations the first day, 50 the next day, and maybe70 the next day\u2026,\u201d Fuller says. \u201cA lot of amputations the first few days, … 300 probably, total.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"<p>Dr.<\/a>
Dr. Robert Fuller with other International Medical Corps volunteers outside a Port-au-Prince hospital. Photo by Margaret Aguirre, International Medical Corps.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fuller says many of the patients he saw were desperate for care.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen they saw us there doing our triaging, which was basically a magic marker on their arms to decide who should go to the ER next, they were all desperate to be written on because they knew they were getting care \u2026,\u201d Fuller says. \u201cIt was very, very hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fuller said his prior experience treating patients in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after a tsunami killed 300,000 people there in December 2004, helped him coordinate emergency medical efforts on the ground in Haiti. Fuller was the interim director of emergency medicine in a clinic in Banda Aceh for one month.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy experience during the tsunami really helped me \u2026,\u201d Fuller says. \u201cI had that experience to fall back on, what worked and what didn\u2019t work there. … I was able to anticipate some of the oncoming illnesses. I was able to anticipate, for instance, there would be tetanus patients coming in on day number nine, and sure enough there were tetanus patients there. So I was able to tell people what to do and what to expect when those things start to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fuller was also part of the medical response team from the Health Center that assisted in the efforts at ground zero in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. Over its 24 hours of service, the team offered specialized rescue\/medical care and assisted in the search and rescue efforts.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Carolyn Pennington from UConn Health Center Communications talks with Dr. Fuller about his experiences:<\/em><\/p>\n

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Dr. Robert Fuller, director of emergency medicine at the UConn Health Center, has returned from Haiti after spending two weeks there providing emergency medical care to earthquake survivors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[40],"class_list":["post-9777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 00:57:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9777"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37243,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9777\/revisions\/37243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9777"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=9777"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}