Manassas doctor's hospital in Haiti survives quake

Dr. Gilbert R. Irwin’s medical clinic in Haiti is still standing.

The Clinique de St. Joseph in Thomassique hasn’t yet been inundated with refugees after the 7.0 earthquake hit from Port Au Prince 50 to 60 miles away, but Irwin is sure that the hospital will soon be seeing its share of patients.

“Obviously for the next few days it’s a rescue and recovery type of situation,” said Irwin, a Manassas family doctor who opened the hospital three years ago through his non-profit Medical Missionaries.

“Once that’s over all those people who survived and lost everything are going to migrate back to their respective rural areas,” Irwin said. “We expect that we’re going to be overwhelmed in the next few weeks.”

Irwin said he worked through the night Tuesday after the earthquake hit trying to get information on the hospital that he worked 13 years to build.

“Fortunately our hospital in Haiti wasn’t destroyed,” he said. The hospital serves 125,000 people a year under normal circumstances. The hospital sees 150 to 200 patients a day and delivers roughly 50 babies a month.

Irwin said that people who lived in the Haitian capital before the quake will probably migrate back to their rural homes after rescue and recovery operations end. Many of them will be on foot, Irwin said.

“We expect to have an overflow in the next few weeks and that may be sustained because these people now have no place to go,” Irwin said.

Irwin doesn’t yet know if he’s going to go to Haiti. He said he might just let his teams there do their work. He said communications there are bad and he might be able to get more done from Manassas.

“We help supply and supervise about 100 medical teams that go all over Haiti and we’re trying to see how we can coordinate with the military or whatever to get to these people on the ground and help out as best we can,” Irwin said. “Right now I’m more effective dealing with the big players up here instead of down there.”

The organization is accepting donations at Medical Missionaries, Inc. c/o Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund; 9590 Surveyor Court, Manassas, Va. 20110.

The group is also working with its partners Project Hope and the Catholic Medical Mission Board in New York, Irwin said.

Irwin said the recovery will be a long time coming in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

“It will take years for this recover and we need years of sustained support to deal with these problems even more than we did just 24 hours ago,” Irwin said.