Community Health Workers, or CHWs, play an important role on the C2C team.  Working closely with the clinic staff, they schedule follow up visits with patients, and travel throughout the community, educating and raising awareness.

Camp Coq is spread over a large area and the CHWs need to be able to reach all corners of the community.  Finding a patient’s home can be quite difficult, as there are no street names or house numbers, but we are committed to 100% follow up with all of our patients.  With this in mind, team members Julia Maxwell, Global Programs Manager, Dr. Jean-Eric Calvaire, Haiti Country Manager, and myself, recently worked with our CHW team to conduct a mapping activity of the community.

The CHWs led the process of neighborhood identification.  Their grassroots connection with the community is integral, not only to this exercise, but to the clinic’s operations as well.

During the activity, the team worked to create a map that would: divide up the neighborhoods to ensure complete coverage, flag vulnerable areas where families might need particular kinds of support, and map routes for accessing hard-to-reach areas (some require several hours walk, while others are accessible by motorbike).

Having a strong visual tool to aid them will allow the CHWs to ensure they are able to reach all of our patients in the Camp Coq Community.

“C2C doesn’t wait for the fire to come to us.  We find the fire in the community,” Fusley Laguerre, C2C’s lab technician in Camp Coq, told me during my visit last week.

He’s right!  C2C is about giving people the tools they need to keep themselves and their families healthy, from preventive education to efficient treatment.  Our clinicians and Community Health Workers are constantly in the community – in schools, in people’s homes, in churches – to educate as many people as possible about ways to avoid illness.  We find the fire in the community and give patients the information they need to stay healthy.

When prevention isn’t enough, our clinic provides excellent clinical services.  One patient, Martha, said, “I was never able to get proper care elsewhere.  As soon as I heard about this clinic I came, and it has changed my life.  Here, it’s human being to human being, and they treat people very well.”

The clinic’s self-appointed godmother, Rejeanne (pictured above), said, “This clinic is for us.  The prices are good, we don’t have to travel, and it’s important for us to support it.”

Having visited clinics in Haiti and elsewhere, I understand what Rejeanne, Martha, and their neighbors most likely experienced before their community partnered with C2C.  Travel on the back of a motorcycle taxi, long wait times (sometimes stretching into the next day), pharmacy stock-outs, non-functioning labs, rushed staff, and dirty surroundings are unfortunately the norm in many places.

I’m always in awe of our staff members on the ground, who work tirelessly to improve health in and around their community and provide a clean, safe space for treatment.  Our physician at Camp Coq, Dr. Preval, said it best: “We are always in the community so everyone knows us and we have a good understanding of their needs.  We hear from the community that they are happy and get better care here, and that’s why we do what we do.”

This year’s Parish Day in Camp Coq, the celebration of the founding of the Parish of Marie Médiatrice, included a special partnership between Care 2 Communities and St. Jean Hospital (which is the nearest hospital to C2C’s clinic).

Team members from St. Jean traveled to our clinic to offer free HIV/AIDS testing to Camp Coq locals.  The event was a complete success, with more than 150 people lining up to be tested!

Dr. Jean-Eric Calvaire, C2C’s Haiti Country Manager, said, “This is a great C2C/St. Jean Hospital collaboration. The HIV testing day allows people who would never pay for the transportation to go to the hospital to be tested in their neighborhood for free. And the people who were diagnosed are now in touch with St Jean Hospital for better care. Those people might never know their positive HIV status if C2C had not sought out this partnership.”

Because HIV/AIDS testing and treatment is a very serious, and organized process globally, C2C is partnering with St. Jean Hospital to ensure our patients receive the safest and most responsible care.

The partnership is scheduled to continue, with St. Jean team members visiting the Camp Coq clinic on the first and third Tuesday of each month to test pregnant C2C patients.  This testing is part of C2C’s new antenatal care program, and we are grateful to be able to offer it to the community.

C2C is excited to welcome our newest team member, Dr. Youveline Preval.  Dr. Preval will serve as clinic doctor for our Camp Coq, Haiti clinic, bringing expansive leadership and management experience with her.

Dr. Preval earned her medical degree from the Université Notre Dame d’Haïti in 2012. She completed her training and internships with Hôpital Justinien in Cap-Haitien, Haiti.

Following her internships, she was a Program Assistant for CONALD (Commission National de Lutte Contre La Drogue), Haiti’s national commission for the fight against drugs. As Program Assistant, Dr. Preval organized logistics for the head of Haiti’s North-East Department. She also supervised and trained nurses and social workers to work effectively with patients with drug addictions, and their families.

At C2C, Dr. Preval will devote most of her time to caring for patients and their families, but will also manage other clinic staff.

Dr. Jean-Eric Calvaire, C2C’s Haiti Country Manager, said, “Dr. Preval has a very strong history of managing and training, and she is looking forward to serving the community in Camp Coq.”

We look forward to growing our services in Camp Coq under Dr. Preval’s leadership!

As I landed in Cap-Haitien last week, the rain began to fall so hard and fast it was three inches deep in only 15 minutes. Over the next five days of traveling between Cap-Haitien and C2C’s clinic in Camp Coq, I would come to understand just how challenging transport can be during Haiti’s rainy season.

Leaving Cap Haitian in rush hour traffic is always challenging, but the heavy rain worsened things. Massive rivers of water, mud and garbage from the hills ran into the roads and created deep, irregular potholes.

City congestion eventually gave way to steep green mountains and a rushing river.  As we neared C2C’s clinic in Camp Coq, I couldn’t stop thinking of how difficult it must be for our patients to travel on those roads.  Most travel via local tap-taps (Haitian shared taxis) or – more likely – on the back of a tiny motorcycle. Transportation is expensive, and distances to other medical facilities can be quite long.

When we arrived, the waiting room was busy with women, small children and older men waiting to be seen. C2C’s head nurse, Herlande Duvot, stopped to greet us before quickly returning to treating patients, prescribing medications from the pharmacy and sending for results from the on-site laboratory.

I met an older woman who had come in with her 11-year-old grandson (pictured above). He had been sick for many weeks, and was dehydrated and in pain. He was seen quickly by Nurse Duvot and sent to the lab for diagnostic tests. I felt confident that the lab tech and nurse had the tools and medication they needed to treat this young boy properly.

I felt proud that the C2C clinic is in the community – providing access to quality health care, laboratory, and pharmacy without an expensive, treacherous motorcycle ride through the rain and mud. Talking with this grandmother made it clear to me that we are making an enormous difference in her life and the lives of others in Camp Coq.

C2C is happy to announce we have begun Phase 1 of a technology upgrade at our Camp Coq clinic.  We’ve partnered with Vecna Cares, a Cambridge-based organization, which provides training and technology to support and strengthen health systems in underserved areas.  This partnership was made possible, in part, by a gift from The Funding Network.

Earlier this month, C2C’s Global Programs Manager Julia Maxwell, along with Vecna Cares’ Executive Director Deborah Theobald and Program Manager Emily Wang, flew down to Camp Coq, Haiti to set up the new CliniPAK system at the C2C clinic.  The CliniPAK (Clinical Patient Administration Kit) will allow C2C’s team of doctors, nurses and community health workers to record and report data on a patient’s visit, diagnoses, and prescriptions, using laptops and tablets.

“The clinic staff is incredibly excited about the implementation of the Vecna system.  As soon as they started training on the system, they realized just how much more time they would have to focus on patients instead of paperwork,” said Maxwell.

C2C clinic staff will now be able to track the medical histories of thousands of patients, giving us the opportunity to make more effective clinical decisions, build strong long-term relationships with our patients, and spot community health trends that warrant attention.  Noticeable trends will lead to tailored health education sessions and home visits by C2C’s Community Health Workers (CHWs).

Later this year, the CHWs will also begin using CliniPAK in the field.  Phase 2 of this project will include CliniPAK Lite programs for CHWs, which will allow for more efficient surveys and home follow-up visits as well as capture data from health education sessions in the community.

Haiti.  For many in the international community, the name invokes images of chaos, disaster, poverty, corruption and an unhealthy reliance on foreign aid.  C2C has been working in Haiti since 2010 and has opened two clinics there, one in urban Port-au-Prince after the earthquake and one in northern Camp Coq, a lush, rural village with a subsistence-based community.  I recently spent some time with our clinical team there and had the opportunity to shadow our community health workers (CHWs) during their home visits in the neighborhoods surrounding the clinic.  Despite the language barrier, it was overwhelmingly apparent that the people we serve in Camp Coq are poor and sick from preventable and treatable illnesses and eager for better health.  The people we met asked questions, had story after story about an illness in the household that required time-consuming and expensive travel to the health facilities 40 minutes away by taxi and all were hopeful that the C2C clinic located in Camp Coq would reduce the burden they experience daily of poor health.

It is incumbent on us, on our amazing, dedicated, 100% Haitian clinical team in Camp Coq to a) price our services as low as possible while striving for long-term financial sustainability, b) do all that we can to educate the community about the importance of childhood immunizations, chronic care maintenance and family planning and c) deliver high-quality, personal health care to each and every patient that comes to our clinic.  From what I saw in my brief visit to Camp Coq, we have the team in place to achieve all these things and consequently improve the health of the overall community.   Using a basic market-driven approach, with customer-service, consistency and operational efficiency as core tenets, C2C can build a sustainable primary care model that helps meet the health care demands of the Haitian population, one community at a time.