Haitians seek free care from U.S. Navy hospital ship

Medical personnel on the Comfort have treated 1,380 patients so far

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — One man needed a hernia operation. A young girl came to seek help for her 3-year-old cousin whose skin was inexplicably covered with sores. And a mother of four needed help with a chronic allergy reaction.

They all took the chance to travel miles from home to the Haitian Coast Guard base Killick this week in search of medical care from the U.S. Navy ship Comfort, the floating U.S. naval hospital that arrived Monday. It was a rare calm following two months of protests, burning tires and impassable barricades.

“I already feel better”‘ Jean Seide, 47, said Thursday as he lay in a bed waiting to be wheeled into the operating room aboard the ship to treat a large hernia that has plagued him for years.

Two miles away on shore, Marie Sabrine Sempre, sitting under a tent with scores of other waiting patients, was equally hopeful.

“I found medicine from them before, and it was good,” she said, describing what appeared to be an allergic reaction.

Haiti is the ship’s 12th and final stop following a deployment that began in June in Ecuador.

Though the goal of the ship’s mission was to relieve the health care stress placed on nations in the hemisphere by the crisis in Venezuela, the Haiti stop was a personal request from the country’s U.S. ambassador, Michele Sison, according to the head of the U.S Southern Command, Adm. Craig Faller.

When Sison made the request earlier this year, Haiti was not in a protracted political crisis. Schools were still functioning, hotels were struggling but still open, and Haitians weren’t facing a disturbing humanitarian crisis.

“Haiti is going through a tough time,” Sison told some of the more than 800 doctors, dentists, nurses and other medical professionals aboard the Comfort on Thursday. “If you haven’t had the opportunity to get down to the Haitian Coast Guard base Killick, which is the medical site … I want to tell you what we all saw down there touches the heart. There were over 1,000 people at the gates yesterday. They told me upwards of 3,000 today at the medical site.”

The Comfort, she said, has brand recognition in Haiti, where the ship first visited in 2007 and again after the 2010 earthquake.

Faller, who arrived in the country Thursday as part of a threecountry Caribbean tour and later met with President Jovenel Moise, called the outreach in Haiti “very powerful.”

“It shows the power of an outstretched hand, the power of what we can do when we work together,” he said. “Here in Haiti we’ve had the opportunity to see first hand the impact that it has made.”

During their time out to sea, the ship’s crew, which includes medical professionals from other countries in the region, has treated more than 64,000 patients. That number will surely rise, with the crew expecting to see between 300 and 500 patients a day at the shore-based medical site in Haiti. Ship surgeons can conduct as many as 20 operations a day. On Thursday, the crew treated 599 patients. They also performed 15 surgeries. So far, a total of 1,380 Haitians have received free medical care.

And while some surgeries were prescreened prior to the visit, patients arriving at the medical site were also being flagged and screened to have surgery if they need it, said Comfort spokeswoman Lt. Mary Smith.

“We set out to treat people, make a difference, change lives,” Faller said. “Some of the communities the ship has gone, the volume of patients the ship was able to see in a few days equal two to three months of flows through the local health care system.”