16284: (Hermantin) Miami-Herald-Haitian widow's mission: Improve care in hospitals (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Tue, Aug. 05, 2003

Haitian widow's mission: Improve care in hospitals
BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
jcharles@herald.com

It's a mission that began in the most tragic of circumstances, when a
prominent Haitian businesswoman realized that, in a country of more than
eight million people, her husband could not get the emergency medical care
he needed.

So seven months after frantically driving her husband around Port-au-Prince
in a futile search for urgent care, Dominique Carvonis is on a mission to
save lives.

She is now a widow. Her husband, Michel Carvonis, suffered a stroke and
could not get proper treatment within the critical first three hours.
Eventually he was airlifted to Miami, but it was too late. He died a few
days later.

Now Carvonis, a 46-year-old Haitian hotel owner, is traveling to
Haitian-American enclaves throughout the United States and Canada in hopes
of raising money -- and awareness -- for her crusade: to construct and equip
a 6,000-square-foot state-of-the-art emergency room and intensive care unit
in the Haitian capital.

''There are great doctors in Haiti, but they don't have the proper
equipment,'' Carvonis said last week, after pleading her case to medical
professionals at Baptist Health South Florida and before traveling to
Montreal to make a similar plea.

Dr. Pierre Mercier, a Port-au-Prince physician who works in public health,
said that while Haiti boasts several public and private hospitals, they are
poorly equipped.

''We don't have a real intensive health unit that could quickly handle and
provide treatment for those patients who are critical and in urgent need of
that kind of care,'' said Mercier, who knows Carvonis and is familiar with
her crusade. ``The few [emergency rooms] we have are badly equipped.''

Dr. Reginald Pereira, a Haitian physician who works at Cedars Medical Center
-- the Miami hospital where Michel Carvonis was taken -- and serves as
consultant for doctors in Haiti, called Haiti's lack of properly equipped
medical facilities ``disastrous.''

''The public sector has nothing,'' said Pereira, who routinely treats
patients airlifted from Haiti. ``The private sector has hospitals, but most
of the time they don't have the necessary equipment.''

During meetings at South Miami and Baptist hospitals, Carvonis recalled the
helplessness she felt after Michel suffered a stroke in the middle of the
night in January.

With her daughter calling the doctor on the cellphone, Dominique Carvonis
rushed Michel, a prominent dentist, to a hospital.

Fifteen minutes after the family arrived, they were told that Michel would
have to be taken to a private, mobile unit for a CAT scan, because the
hospital could not perform the critical test.

''An hour later they took him back to the hospital,'' Carvonis said Friday
in a telephone interview. ``There was no intensive care unit. I had to put
him in a regular room with a regular nurse.''

Michel Carvonis died a few days later at Cedars, where Pereira was the
attending physician. Carvonis was 53.

''If my husband had received the proper treatment, I am sure the situation
would have been different, medically speaking,'' Dominique said.

And so was born the Michel Carvonis Foundation and an ambitious plan to
raise $3.5 million in cash and equipment for the first phase of an emergency
room and 10-bed ICU on the grounds of the privately owned, not-for-profit
Haitian Community Hospital in Port-au-Prince's Petionville neighborhood.

So far, Carvonis said she has raised $20,000 -- mostly from the
word-of-mouth contributions of Haitian Americans. In addition, Dr. Laurence
Schwartz, a Broward County orthodontist and longtime family friend, raised
$5,000. The funds are being collected by the Haitian Community Hospital's
foundation, which is set up in Miami.

Cedars has agreed to donate some equipment, she and Pereira said.

Carvonis is also seeking technical assistance with the training of emergency
room technicians and nurses and a business plan for the clinic's
construction.

Kathy Sparger, chief nursing officer at South Miami Hospital, said the
hospital and its network, Baptist Health, ``are definitely interested in
seeing how we can lend a helping hand to Haiti and this foundation.''

Sparger said a group from the hospital network plans to go to Haiti soon to
look at the site.

Baptist Health South Florida and its network of four hospitals has worked
with medical professionals from several Caribbean islands, including Turks
and Caicos, and Jamaica. About five years ago, the network helped establish
a clinic in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Using a video camera and a telephone, a
doctor at the Montego Bay clinic can consult with a doctor in Miami about a
patient.

''Baptist Health is committed to our international patients,'' said Sparger,
a registered nurse with 30 years of critical care experience. `One of the
things we strive to share is our clinical expertise in those areas that
don't have the same level of medical care that we have in the state.''

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