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DURHAM — In the spring after a massive earthquake devastated Haiti, Adam Flowe came to work in a hospital on the Caribbean island and found what he called “a broken place.”
“The morgue had failed, there was no constant power supply, no cooling facilities, no plumbing,” he recalled. The line for the emergency room was sometimes 25 or 30 people deep.
It was brutally hot.
As a certified registered nurse anesthetist at Duke University Health System, Flowe knew what he had to do: Keep it simple.
“We normally have very sophisticated tools and methods, but we knew we had to go with a basic approach,” he said. “That was the best way to be most effective.”
With his hand-held pulse oximeter — to monitor the oxygenation of a patient’s blood — Flowe administered anesthesia to patient after patient, continually checking breathing and cardiac stability and performing a multitude of other services.
It’s what CRNAs do, particularly in places that are not endowed with the panoply of modern medical conveniences most of us take for granted.
In those places, the CRNAs are generally the sole anesthesia professionals.
In honor of National Nurse Anesthetists Week, which ends today, CRNAs at Duke are hosting the second annual Global Health Fundraiser to help send more CRNAs to under-served places around the world.
The big bash tonight at Bay 7 in the American Tobacco Campus, complete with food, drink, entertainment and both a live and silent auction, is designed to raise money to send Flowe and his colleagues to places like Haiti and Ghana.
“Part of our mission is to support global health,” said Meri Gilman-Mays, the chief nurse anesthetist at Duke. “We go to places like Haiti, Rwanda, Uganda and Ghana because these are areas that really need the kind of help we can provide. These are the places where there is a real need for nurse anesthetists.”
CRNAs have been practicing at Duke for more than 50 years, and there are now around 85 of them on staff. Only in recent years, though, have many of them traveled to a variety of underserved countries.
While they are providing services in these countries, they are also teaching.
“In Ghana, if a baby pops out and doesn’t immediately cry, they just throw it out,” Gilman-Mays said. “If a mother is hemorrhaging, they just basically die. The maternal mortality rate is horrible.”
So Duke CRNAs have opened up a school in Ghana, to teach anesthesia techniques to local people to help reduce the mortality rate.
“It’s the idea of giving a person a fish or teaching them how to fish,” Gilman-Mays said. “They need to know how to catch the fish.”
The teaching is important, added Flowe, because “you can only do so much.”
In Haiti, he said, “I was helping individuals through moments of crisis. I don’t think I affected any change in their systems, at least not a lasting change. That’s what we need to do.”
