Deployment Begins

We are moving forward rapidly in our response to the earthquake in Haiti. The University of Chicago has assumed a coordination role involving multiple hospitals in the Chicago area. This enables us to pull together teams from multiple sites.

From the many volunteers who have contacted us, we will be deploying two teams to the region on Monday, January 25, 2010. We expect additional teams will be deployed to meet the evolving medical needs created by this truly enormous natural disaster.

A five-member surgical and post-operative care team will fly to the Dominican Republic Monday to serve in Jimani, a small town on the border with Haiti that has become a destination for medical care. The hospital there, now surrounded by a city of tents, has 10 operating rooms. It has hundreds of post-operative cases, mostly amputations and complex fractures with external fixations, that require extensive follow-up care -- which is delivered in medical tents. This team will serve for two weeks and then be replaced by a back-up team, also from the University. They will alternate every two weeks.

The Medical Center has also arranged for a second team of three emergency medicine physicians from North Shore University Health System, Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University, to be deployed to a hospital in Port Au Prince, Haiti.

We have been impressed and gratified by the tremendous response to the call for volunteers and support from our community. These carefully selected teams use just a small percentage of the many who offered their services, but they match the immediate needs of the Haitian people. Special recognition goes to Michael Sorensen, IT Director, who has played a central role in arranging the charter flight and obtaining supplies.