(Reuters) Catherine Bremer - Dr. Ofer Merin, an Israeli army trauma surgeon heading a fully equipped hospital brought to Haiti by the Israeli military, said the hardest job was triage - deciding which casualties were most likely to live with quick treatment or most benefit from intensive care without blocking up beds. As Merin takes a break from his around-the-clock schedule to show off the facilities, a skinny 6-year-old girl called Jessica is carried in. Six days after the quake, she has just been dug out of the rubble. Set up in green army tents on a soccer field near the airport but equipped to treat even complex injuries, the Israeli military hospital is strangely quiet and scrupulously clean. Patients are identified with bar codes and their progress is tracked on a computer network. Within hours of the surgeons, paramedics, nurses and soldiers landing on Friday, people on makeshift stretchers with crushed, gangrenous limbs were lined up outside for beds in the intensive care, pediatric, orthopedic and other wards. More than 300 patients have been treated and discharged.
2010-01-20 08:11:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive