HEI/SBH’s world-class surgical center is the most advanced facility of its kind in southern Haiti.
The facility opened in 2016, funded in part by USAID/ASHA with the generosity of the American people. It contains modern, fully-equipped operating rooms, a permanent orthopedic surgery program, and dedicated spaces for pre- and post-operative care.
Our dedicated surgical team consists of three surgeons, one global surgery fellow, two surgical residents from training hospitals across Haiti, and social service residents participating in month-long surgical rotations. On average, the team performs about 400 procedures per month for a wide range of conditions such as cancer, urology, vascular, reconstruction needs, and more. The team also does wound care procedures, including skin grafts for burn patients. SBH has quickly become a major burn care center for a considerable portion of the country.
Delivering compassionate care in our surgical center.
Our Unique Surgical Model
At SBH, our model for surgery has revolutionized the level of surgical care patients can receive in a low-resource setting.
Hospitals in developed countries rely on large teams of highly-specialized surgeons to provide care to their patients. But in Haiti, there are only approximately 180 surgeons in the entire country, and only 11% of care facilities have the capacity to provide surgery. Patients in need of urgent surgical care cannot wait for a specialty surgeon to be found, and there simply are not enough surgeons in the country for hospitals to have large specialized teams.
Instead of relying on large teams of specialty surgeons, we have cross-trained a small team of general surgeons to perform a comprehensive set of advanced specialty procedures. The hospital’s cross-training model is similar to the US Navy SEAL training approach in that each team member learns how to conduct many different tasks critical to the team’s mission. This approach increases overall system efficiency since every member of the team has intimate knowledge of and experience with our entire surgical system. As a result, our team is never dependent on any one individual and life-saving procedures are therefore never delayed.
