Our partners in health: Johnny Bernard, Pharmacist, St Marc, Haiti

By Kate Thanel, PIH Haiti Curriculum and Training Specialist

	Johnny Bernard
	Johnny and his team.

"Working in health is like being in the army, there are situations to which we are automatically consigned," says Johnny Bernard, a pharmacist at the Hopital St. Nicolas (HSN) in St. Marc. "The first day of the cholera outbreak, my entire team spent the night at the hospital, making deliveries between the warehouse and the wards."

HSN, which is operated jointly by PIH's Haitian sister organization Zanmi Lasante (ZL) and Haiti's Ministry of Public Health and Population, is located in the region that has been hit hardest by the cholera epidemic. In the first days of the outbreak, hundreds of cholera patients flooded the facility. The emergency situation called on all of Johnny's experience and expertise to coordinate the work of ZL's pharmacy and warehouse staff to keep ZL's facilities stocked and supplied.

This isn't the first time Johnny has faced an emergency. In the aftermath of the January earthquake, he gained experience responding to the staggering needs of the immediate relief efforts. He trained his team to anticipate the needs of medical staff and they learned to respond to the crisis efficiently because they could not afford to lose time.

The strength and efficiency of Johnny's team was called on again on October 18. Days before test results confirming the cholera outbreak, doctors started calling the warehouse requesting large quantities of materials to respond to severe diarrhea and vomiting. "The emergency room was a crazy place, as everyone rushed around trying to meet the patients' needs," recalls Johnny. His team quickly figured out the materials they would need. However, predicting the quantities they would need was a challenge. They
soon realized that their usual system of delivering supplies on request by the nurses was not going to keep up with the increased demand. So they created a new system- each ward had its own stock to pull from and enough to last for an entire day. This way the warehouse team could take on the increased workload and the medical staff always had what they needed and wasted no time making orders.

On the second night after the outbreak was detected, Johnny's team again worked through the night. Johnny describes how one of his pharmacist colleagues spent two days sleeping in his car so as to stay at the pharmacy, because he knew his experience as a pharmacist would be in desperate need at the hospital. "Crisis brings out the human side of each of us," said Johnny.

The team fortunately was able to recruit volunteers to help take on some of the workload, but only after they had carefully trained the volunteers on how to make deliveries as well as perform needs assessments, as the clinicians were spending all their efforts treating patients, leaving them unable to track when supplies were running low. Johnny also wanted to make sure that the volunteers, who were not trained health workers, were knowledgeable about cholera transmission. "We needed to train them so that they would understand the dangers and respect security and contamination control measures," he said.

Although he describes his team as "consigned" to working around the clock in situations like these, it is a self-imposed dedication to their work and mission that drives them. "The institutional philosophy [at ZL] is you do whatever it takes to provide patients with the best possible care," says Johnny. "ZL chooses their employees and employees choose to work for ZL on this basis. Everyone was afraid but this was no excuse to turn our backs."