Thursday, November 6, 2008

Pregnant women desperate for free emergency care in Haiti

Haiti 2007 © Julie Rémy
A patient waits for an available bed five hours after being admitted to the hospital.

DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS

Press Release
November 6, 2008
Pregnant Women Desperate for Free Emergency Care in Haiti
Doctors Without Borders Struggling to Provide Care

Port-au-Prince, November 6, 2008 – Teams from the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF) are struggling to provide free, quality emergency care to pregnant women and their babies in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti.

Over the last month, hundreds of women have desperately sought emergency obstetric care at Jude-Anne hospital in Port-au-Prince. In October, hospital staff assisted a record high of 56 women giving birth in one day and received 160 women waiting for hospitalization. The hospital has been so overwhelmed by demand that mothers have given birth in the hospital’s waiting room, the staircases, and in the washrooms, essentially anywhere they could find space.

Read rest of press release at http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/pr/release.cfm?id=3172