Dr. Brian Crawford

Brian Crawford, an emergency room physician at Penrose-St.Francis, was picked to join a relief mission run by Project HOPE, a 47-year-old agency that provides medical care worldwide.He left this week.

Crawford, 36, of Manitou Springs also has done relief work in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala.

In addition to providing basic medical care, Crawford expects to treat diseases that have emerged since the tsunami.

"There have been reported cases of cholera in some camps," he said."Currently, most are diseases we would expect from poor water and sanitation."

Crawford and the rest of the Project HOPE medical team will work on the Navy hospital ship Mercy.

While most Americans focus their global attention on Iraq, Dr. Brian Crawford has been concerned with another trouble spot: Haiti.
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Crawford, an emergency-department physician in Colorado Springs, recently returned from a week-long trip to Haiti, where he assessed conditions at a U.S.-funded hospital after the latest turmoil in the Caribbean nation.Click here for full article.

While most Americans focus their global attention on Iraq, Dr. Brian Crawford has been concerned with another trouble spot: Haiti.Crawford, an emergency-department physician in Colorado Springs, recently returned from a weeklong trip to Haiti, where he assessed conditions at a U.S.-funded hospital after the latest turmoil in the Caribbean nation.Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned Feb. 29, ousted by a bloody, three-week rebellion in which about 300 people died.A U.S.-led multinational force now in place there will give way to a U.N. peacekeeping force in June.Crawford, 36, was asked by the Johns Hopkins Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies to examine the situation at Hôpital Albert Schweitzer.The hospital, operated by a Pittsburgh-based charitable organization, serves a rural population of about 285,000 in Haiti's central Artibonite Valley.Crawford has been involved in disaster relief and assessment before; he helped with earthquake drills and emergency-medicine assessment in Guatemala and ran a rural clinic in the Dominican Republic on the Haitian border.His mission this time was to assess how Hôpital Albert Schweitzer fared during the rebellion, looking at the number of visits to the hospital, disruptions in service and supplies, effects on community health programs and so on.He also worked to help develop a disaster plan in the event of future crises."Unfortunately," he says, "political turmoil is so common in Haiti."The technology at Hôpital Albert Schweitzer is not as advanced as in U.S. hospitals, and access to medicines and food is very limited, Crawford says.But the 190-bed hospital the second-largest in Haiti delivers a high level of care by the standards of that area of the world, he adds."To the hospital's credit, it stayed open continuously and never closed," says Crawford, who also visited some outlying clinics.
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Crawford acknowledges he had concerns about visiting the troubled country.U.S. State Department warnings against travel to Haiti remain in effect.While there, though, "I never at any point felt a fear for my life."Crawford works at Penrose and Penrose Community hospitals, where patients often comment on his striking resemblance to another emergency-room physician Dr. Mark Greene of TV's "ER."