Haiti’s health sector is on life support as doctors and nurses flee gang violence
Even before a destructive alliance of armed gangs began burning hospitals, health clinics and pharmacies in Haiti in a month-long siege of Portau-Prince, the country’s health sector was in critical condition.
Physicians, nurses and other medical staff were being kidnapped and killed. Taken over by a gang from the Grand Ravine slum of the capital, the Sanatorium Hospital in the Carrefour-Feuilles neighborhood was forced to shut down, leaving HIV/ AIDS and tuberculosis patients with one fewer option for treatment.
“This has huge consequences,” Dr. Jean Ardouin Louis-Charles told the Miami Herald weeks after armed gangs set fire to the structure in August. The hospital, he said, gets “sick people from all of the country.”
“Things will soon get worse for Haiti and for the public,” Louis-Charles, the secretary-general of the Haitian Medical Association, warned. Taking to radio stations after armed groups began looting and vandalizing hospitals and health clinics in metropolitan Port-au-Prince in recent days, he sounded the alarm: “We are in the middle of a humanitarian catastrophe.”
With more than 30 public and private health facilities in the capital forced to close either because of threats or destruction, according to Haiti’s Health Ministry, Haitians have few places that they can turn to for care, and few doctors and nurses to treat them.
Medical personnel have closed their practices and relocated. Some have gone to rural provinces outside the capital. Others have left for the United States or Canada. More than 156,000 Haitians have entered the U.S. as part of a humanitarian-parole program launched by the Biden administration in January 2023 for nationals of Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Louis-Charles said many doctors and medical residents are among them, fleeing the volatile country even before the latest escalation of violence. The departures left the Sanatorium with just half of its staff by the time the Grand Ravine gang moved in. At the Hospital of the State University of Haiti, commonly referred to as the General Hospital, there was just one medical resident in pediatrics.
“Given how the situation is in the country,” he said, the U.S. parole program “has opened a door for them. But for the country, it has huge consequences. It’s a brain-drain.”
Samuel Faldor, 30, a third-year medical resident who works with dialysis patients at the General Hospital, said he and his colleagues are frustrated. Sometimes, he asks himself why is he making the effort when there is nowhere to send a patient, no medicine to give, and not even a way to help relieve people’s pain.
“You feel a sense of indignation,” he said.
In those few instances where a facility is open, patients often can’t get there because of gunfire or the barricades that residents have erected to protect themselves from bandits.
“If someone gets shot, or gets stabbed, they don’t have access to help,” said Dr. Audie Metayer, who runs the dialysis treatment center at the General Hospital. “Even to find blood, you have to go look for it or the patient has to come with it.”
Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez, appears to have dismissed concerns that his country, which provides doctors in
Haiti, is pulling out. On March 18, Rodriguez took to X, formerly Twitter, and said Cuba’s medical brigade will continue working in Haiti with limitations imposed by the circumstances.
The United Nations has called for an end to the violence and unimpeded access for civilians, including doctors and patients, to make it to hospitals and for organizations to be able to deliver aid. So far, neither has happened.
In March there were 114 documented incidents of aid operations being affected by the unabated violence, the U.N. reported. The number is four times higher than in December.
“This latest violence has resulted in the deterioration of an already dire situation. More than 362,000 people are currently displaced across the country with some 160,000 in the Port-auPrince metropolitan area,” the U.N. said on Friday before warning that the health sector has been severely affected.
THINGS WILL SOON GET WORSE FOR HAITI AND FOR THE PUBLIC. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF A HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHE. Dr. Jean Ardouin Louis-Charles, secretary-general of the Haitian Medical Association