Recently, the U.S.Navy’s Project Handclasp reached out to Direct Relief and offered to transport materials to northern Haiti. Project Handclasp is a program that accepts and transports educational, humanitarian and goodwill material donated by America’s private sector on a space-available basis aboard U.S. Navy ships for distribution to foreign nation recipients.

The catch? The items needed to be sent to Camp Pendleton Naval Base in San Diego, California the following day so that they could be loaded onto a Navy Vessel headed for Cuba and then onto Haiti. That meant we had one day to get orders from our clinic partners, pack the orders and get them to San Diego!

Because of Direct Relief’s new IT infrastructure, they were able to send the offer to their outstanding healthcare clinic partners in Haiti, have their orders returned and the shipments packed the following day.

The clinics that received supplies were:

• Hospital University Justinien is the second largest hospital in the country and serves a catchment population of over 1.5 million people. It is a teaching hospital and the main referral hospital for the entire region.
• The Baptist Convention Hospital in Quartier Morin is overseen by Haiti Hospital Appeal, a U.K. based charity dedicated to establishing a quality form of health care that is not restricted to the few but a right for all. With their community healthcare outreach, mobile clinics, maternity and pediatric unit, rehabilitation center, and cholera response efforts, they are truly reaching out to meet the needs of the entire community.
• And finally, the Cap Haitian Health Network is dedicated to sharing information and facilitating the movement of resources among groups and individuals involved in medical care and health promotion. Their distribution network enables smaller clinics and health centers in northern Haiti to have access to essential medical supplies that usually bypass them for the larger facilities.

Thanks to the generous donation from BI and the transportation from Project Handclasp, Direct Relief was able to get these life-saving medicines and supplies (valued at over $2.2 million wholesale) to Haiti which will be used to treat patients without regard to their ability to pay.