After 19 hours of travel, the CCC Team, consisting of Dr. Jennifer Lang, Jacquelyn Dang, Shivam Zaver, and Stephen Morris, safely arrived at the Cap-Haitien International Airport.
We were warmly greeted by Efanor Nore, the Head of the International Medical Corps Northern Haiti Department, and Anne Marie Durosier, the IMC nurse who has been leading the Cap-Haitien “See and Treat” clinic since being trained by CCC last year. H.O.P.E, our ground partner at the Borgne Community Hospital, had sent a truck to pick us up at the airport, and we made the roughly 1.5-hour drive to Borgne.
Upon arrival, we were thrilled to see a fully functioning Phyllis Clinic-Borgne (Donated by Irv Kessler and Barb Anderson) even better than we had left it! A handmade Welcome sign greeted us when we entered the clinic (see picture above). Nurse Adeline Belliard walked us through the clinic, and we took a basic inventory of their supplies. All of the equipment was in excellent working condition, and our need to resupply was very limited. We got a chance to sit down and interview Nurse Adeline about her experience running the clinic since it was established back in December. The report was extremely positive, and she told us that feedback from the local community has been excellent. No women have had any complications as a result of being screened or treated with cryotherapy, and there were several cases of invasive cancer that were identified through this screening process and referred for further treatment. This is especially gratifying as it is almost assured that those cases would not have identified until a much later time without CCC’s cervical cancer screening and treatment clinic in place.
In the evening, we gave the “see and treat” refresher lecture to an intimate group of healthcare professionals. Since they have already heard the lecture before, learned the procedure a year ago, and have been practicing ever since, today’s lecture served as a good review. We covered the various technicalities of the procedure, how to distinguish between a positive and negative case, and a reiteration of CureCervicalCancer’s overall mission. After giving the lecture, the CCC team feels confident in our local healthcare professional’s abilities to see and treat, and we anticipate a highly successful first clinic day tomorrow.
In the end, we showed everyone the total clinic data from Haiti in the past year. This includes 1,427 women screened with 191 positive cases (13.38% positivity rate)! This positivity rate is highly comparable to what the World Health Organization reports and we couldn’t be happier for this success. We are extremely proud of these numbers and look forward to building upon them in the upcoming week!