Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) has deployed its mobile hospital system in Haiti that the organization designed in-house to meet the challenges of operating in a post disaster environment. Boing Boing interviewed Doctors Without Borders representatives in Haiti and New York to give us a better idea of how things are going and what doctors have to work on before seeing their first patients.
Here’s a video from Doctos Without Borders of the setup process:
A snippet from the interview:
Boing Boing: What does one of these inflatable hospital kits consist of?
Laurent Dedieu, MSF, New York: 9 tents, 100 beds, including hospitalization and ICU and recovery beds. A triage and emergency tent, and two operations theatres. The idea is that within the tent we have a complete kit we can deploy including energy supply, water supply, all the sanitation, and all medical equipment inside the tent. In Haiti, everything needed to run a hospital including beds and biomedical equipment is included.
We want to be as autonomous as possible with regard to energy. In this case we have one 30 KV generator and one 60 KV generator. Plus an electrical board, and equipment to ensure electrical safety. And then you have all the electrical wire you need to set up lights inside the ward, and set up plugs for the medical equipment.
Boing Boing: What is the total weight of these portable hospitals you’re shipping by cargo plane?
Laurent Dedieu, MSF, New York: The total weight is around 41 metric tons for the nine tents and all of the logistics equipment, like air conditioners, and electricity. That doesn’t include the medical equipment, just the logistical part of the hospital.
Read on at Boing Boing: Haiti: HOWTO set up a plug-and-play hospital – Doctors Without Borders…