Philips Healthcare donated almost $1 million worth of medical equipment to help a team of medical volunteers from the Caritas Christi Health Care System aid victims of the Haitian earthquake, the company announced last week.

On Thursday, boxes of vital signs monitors, cardiographs, defibrillators, fetal monitors, ventilators and other emergency-use equipment arrived at Sacre Coeur Hospital, in Milot, Haiti.

Sacre Coeur, located about 60 miles north of Port-au-Prince, is a health center managed by the Center for Rural Development of Milot. The modest, 75-bed clinic has expanded to nearly 200 beds to take in more survivors of the devastating 7.0 quake that shook Haiti almost two weeks ago, leaving much of the capital in ruins and hundreds of thousands dead or wounded.

The equipment accompanies a team of 12 emergency medical personnel from Caritas led by Dr. Mark Pearlmutter, chief of emergency medicine for the hospital network, who arrived last Wednesday on a flight chartered from HansCom Air Force Air Force Base, about 15 miles outside of Boston, Mass.

"The team is wonderful, it's a mixture of emergency room doctors, surgeons, nurses and technicians. There is a psychiatrist, a priest, ICU nurse, and two techs from Philips. So it's a very multi-faceted team," Sister Marie Puleo MFIC, senior vice president for mission of Caritas, tells DOTmed News. As one of the heads of Caritas' charitable wing, Puleo helped organize the relief efforts.

The journey is the hardest part

Getting the supplies there wasn't easy, according to Philips. On a snowy Tuesday night, a FedEx car picked up 21 crates of equipment from Philips' headquarters in Andover, Mass., and drove them to Logan airport. FedEx then flew the cargo down to Miami. After a quick stopover, and a change of planes to IBC Airways, the goods went on to Cap-Haitien, an airport located in the north of Haiti largely unaffected by the earthquake, and without the major logjam that delayed flights to Port-au-Prince's overtaxed runways.

Once on the ground, a local transport company, CAS Express, delivered the supplies to the hospital.

The plane landed around 11 a.m. Wednesday. That day, 75 patients were airlifted to the hospital for treatment.

"It was a challenge because we wanted to make sure everybody was safe, but it went pretty smoothly actually," Puleo says.

Another shipment arrived on Friday, carrying more pallets from Philips and from St. Elizabeth Medical Center, Caritas' Boston-based flagship hospital.

The day after the quake

The relief effort got into motion the day after the earthquake, according to Puleo.

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