Power for the Future
Investing in a Major Medical Referral Center in Haiti
Louis J. Auguste, MD, MPH, FACS

Having a power outage during a surgical procedure would be an unthinkable nightmare, anywhere in the world.  Yet, that was almost a daily occurrence at Justinien Hospital, located in the Northern Province of Haiti. This precarious situation due to the unpredictability of the power grid in Haiti was aggravated recently by unending political turmoil and the inability by the government to finance the oil delivery to the country. A group of concerned healthcare workers organized a Support Committee for Justinien Hospital, under the umbrella of the AMHE Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Association of Haitian Physicians Living Abroad (AMHE). This committee decided to bring a solution to this intolerable and dangerous situation. Working with the local Administrator of the Hospital, Dr. Jean Geto Dube, the committee hired a local firm, EX-SE-CO, to provide reliable and continuous solar energy to the operating suite, including the three operating rooms, the recovery room and the sterilization unit.

The firm under the leadership of the engineer, Paul Anthony Charles installed the solar panels on the roof of the recently renovated surgical building to provide electricity to the adjacent operating suite.

Thanks to the prompt execution of the project, the solar energy system will go on-line in this first week of February 2020, making from now on the surgeries safer and alleviating the anxiety of the operating room personnel and the administration.

The Support Committee for Justinien Hospital includes Drs. Louis J. Auguste, Marie-France Conde, David Livingstone, Jean-Michel Loubeau, Danielle Pigneri and Jean-Bernard Poulard, as well as the nurses Victoria Prevost and Fedghynie Saint-Germain and Ms Danielle Auguste.

We seize this opportunity to express our most sincere gratitude to the AMHE Foundation for their cooperation, but mostly to all our contributors and supporters from the Northwell Health System, Queens Hospital Center and Bronx-Lebanon Hospital as well as all our colleagues and friends who have encouraged us and participated in our fundraising activities.