Vanuatu Earthquake: “All Hands On Deck” At Main Hospital

Article – RNZ

Vila Central Hospital staff have been pulling long hours with many leaving their families to look after the injured after last week’s devastating 7.3 magnitude earthquake.Koroi Hawkins, RNZ Pacific Editor

Staff at Vila Central Hospital have been pulling long hours with many leaving their families to look after the injured, after last week’s devastating 7.3 magnitude earthquake.

There are now 14 recorded deaths certified by a medical officer and more than 200 injuries.

Vanuatu’s Director of Hospitals and Curative Services Sereana Natuman said she had to leave her children aged three and 19.

“A lot of us had actually left our families and had to just come and stay at the hospital, and work tirelessly to at least make sure that the injured are seen and that services do continue,” Natuman said.

“We have been going home at like eight, nine o’clock at night but it’s all worth it because at the end of the day, people are safe – lives are not lost in our care.”

She said the number of hospital patients had now decreased.

“We’re able to concentrate on the cases that have been seriously injured and need more medical attention and continuous medical care.”

Natuman said a clinic had also been started for patients who had gone home and needed ongoing treatment.

Dr Sale Vurobaravu, a clinical lead at Vila Central Hospital, was on his lunch break when the quake struck.

He said as soon as he saw the level of disaster, he knew it would be a mass casualty scenario.

“It was all hands on deck,” Vurobaravu said.

“Normally, we run as a National Hospital, we’ve got departments, people in their own corners – like the midwives are in the corner, we’re down at the medical ward, the surgeons, but everybody went up to emergency because we knew that was the port of entry where the casualties were streaming.”

Communication was down and cracks appeared in some of the buildings. Water and electricity were also cut off.

“We were basically handicapped – how I would describe it is basically like a chair running on one leg. It’s very hard to run a service that way.”

He said simple things like blood pressure measurement and providing patients with oxygen could not be done.

The emergency department was also moved outside out of fear that the building was unsafe.

“We were basically out in the car park, like doing an outreach or something, that kind of level of care. We couldn’t provide that specialty care.

“We had well-trained individuals, but we didn’t have the proper facility, and we didn’t have our tools.”

In the future mental health support is going to be needed, Vurobaravu said.

“In the immediate stages we were more concerned about the trauma to patients but there’s also a lot of psychological damage that’s unseen, unrecorded, unheard.

“Our own staff are also quite traumatised, especially the ones working in a ground floor in a double storey building despite the civil engineers’ certifications.”

Natuman said discrepancies over the earthquake death toll was based on different groups recording the deaths.

An earlier report had placed the number of deaths at 16.

“Anyone that hasn’t come through the hospital and certified those [deaths] are the ones that need to come later on,” she said.

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