Poly Alumnus Dr. Michael Vitale ’85 Assists in Haiti Relief Efforts

2/17/2010

Soon after a massive earthquake hit Haiti on January 12, 2010, Michael Vitale ’85, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York, began making plans to travel to the devastated nation and assist in the relief effort.

Vitale connected with the Tico Torres Children Foundation and with the United Aid Foundation, a non-profit organization, through Chris Della Pietra '85.  (Tico Torres is also a drummer in Poly parent Jon Bon Jovi’s band.)

After arriving in the Dominican Republic, Vitale joined a medical convoy and crossed the border into Haiti, stopping at hospitals and refugee camps along the way to perform surgeries on children and adults, many suffering from untreated fractures and broken bones.

Vitale will speak about his Haitian experiences—and the importance of helping out—at Poly’s Upper School Chapel on April 9. A few days ago, Vitale sat down with The Polycam to talk about his work in Haiti, and the best way to support relief efforts there.

What made you decide to go to Haiti?

I am a pediatric orthopedic surgeon—I work in pediatric trauma at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York. The disaster in Haiti created a tremendous need for orthopedic care, so it was sort of an obvious connection. Something like 200 orthopedic surgeons went to Haiti right after the earthquake. People were suffering from fractured extremities and crushed limbs, and there was a tremendous need to fix those limbs as quickly as possible.

At the beginning, I was looking to join established groups that were going to Haiti and needed help. Haiti had little infrastructure, and they lost what little they had in the earthquake. There was little existing care—60 percent of the country had no access to health care before the earthquake.

I ended up connecting with Tico Torres’s foundation, which had a plan to put me in a big hospital in Santiago, in the Dominican Republic. They had chartered helicopters and planned to use them to transport kids who needed complex care to the Dominican hospital, then get them back to Haiti. That plan fell through when the Dominican government decided they didn’t want Haitian patients in the country, fearing they’d have a huge refugee problem on their hands.

Luckily, I had a plan B: United Aid Foundation. It is a relatively small, relatively new group that could quickly get to where it was needed within Haiti, and that’s what we did. I arrived in the Dominican Republic and met a team of anesthesiologists, and later met a plastic surgeon, and we traveled in a convoy together from the Dominican into Haiti.

How did you know where to go, or where you were needed once you arrived in Haiti?

We first stopped in the Dominican town of Jimani, which is on the Haitian border. There was a lot of chaos, but the town had become a huge medical complex. It had a small private hospital and small public hospital. Jimani is only 30 miles from Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, so refugees from Port-au-Prince came to this little town to receive care.

Our priority was to go to Port-au-Prince, but along the way people realized we were a medical convoy, and flagged us down on the road. In one town, called Baharonna, the orthopedic surgeon in the hospital there was overwhelmed and unequipped. He walked me around the hospital and people were lying around with weeks-old untreated fractures or infections. We basically unpacked our bags, set up shop, and operated until we were done.

After Baharonna, we went to another site in Haiti only 11 miles from the Dominican border. A new refugee camp was being built at a preexisting orphanage by a Christian charity called Love A Child.  The orphanage had 55 acres of land, and a huge fresh water well, so a group of humanitarian groups set up camp there.

It was extraordinary. In my five days there, the camp grew by 200 patients per day. The Red Cross was setting up tents, generators, satellite stations, and medical supplies as fast as they could. By the time I left, there were four full-time operating rooms. We’d wake up early, around sunrise, and work through the day as long as we could.  By the end, because we had generators, we were able to operate late into the night. We really felt like we were making a difference.

What were working conditions like?

We triaged patients based on urgency. The reality is that while care is much different with limited resources, you just have to fix the fractures. The earthquake was a unique disaster for several reasons.  It was so close to the United States. It left no infrastructure in Haiti, and it created such a huge need for orthopedic surgeons.

I have done similar work, volunteering in China and Honduras, but never in a disaster like this. In the end, a similarly horrible number of people probably will have died in Haiti as in the tsunami of 2006.  Haiti has a very sad history, but what’s made this disaster even more heartbreaking is that over the last four or five years in Haiti, there’s been an emergence of a middle class, and the hope that some might get out of the extreme poverty there. All these people, who got out of the slums and moved into shabby accommodations in the last five years, were disproportionately affected.  Many of the patients we saw were middle class people who worked in banking or tourism, and they lost everything.

Do you plan to go back?

I hope to go back to Love a Child. I am planning to help develop a base in the Dominican Republic to do true pediatric orthopedics. After the acute phase, there is still a need for reconstruction and treatment for bones that have not healed and treatment for infections. That’s hard to do in tent cities, so we have to leverage existing infrastructure, particularly in the Dominican Republic.

Are there any organizations you’d recommend to those looking to donate money or supplies to the Haiti relief efforts?

Sometimes, the small organizations are a bit of an unknown in a massive relief effort like this one in Haiti, but the United Aid Foundation has made such a big difference there. I’m really comfortable with the organization and confident they are doing important work on the ground there.