UAMS Professors Lend Expertise to Haiti

By David Robinson

A clinical lab technician at work in Haiti.

Dec. 16, 2011 | Two UAMS professors are helping rebuild Haiti’s clinical laboratory services, a key part of the country’s earthquake-devastated health care system.

Robert Lorsbach, M.D., Ph.D., and Donald Simpson, Ph.D., M.P.H., learned Dec. 3 that they had received a $29,000 College of American Pathologists Foundation grant to support their efforts. The grant will support training of Haitian laboratory technicians at UAMS and training and equipment to provide timely Pap smears for Haitian women.

“Haiti has the highest incidence of cervical cancer in the Western Hemisphere, and the poverty in Haiti is beyond the imagination
of most Americans,” Lorsbach said. “It’s a level of poverty you
might see in sub-Saharan Africa, but it’s right in our own backyard.”

Prior to receiving the grant, Lorsbach and Simpson were funding the lab training program and exchange out of their own pockets.

Jennifer Hunt, M.D., who chairs the Department of Pathology, said the exchange has been endorsed by the College of Medicine and UAMS Medical Center administration.

“I commend Dr. Lorsbach and Dr. Simpson for their selfless efforts on behalf of patients in Haiti, and particularly under-served women” Hunt said. “The sharing of their expertise, in partnership with others, serves as a model for this type of very sustainable aid.”

After visiting Haiti in October, Lorsbach and Simpson are hosting two Haitians – Edgard Joachim and Betty Alexandre – who will oversee clinical laboratories in Haitian hospitals affiliated with Partners in Health (PIH), an international health organization that works to improve the health of the poor and marginalized. There are 12 PIH affiliated hospitals in Haiti.

Lorsbach, associate professor and director of hematopathology in the UAMS College of Medicine, said the project to develop clinical laboratory expertise was initiated when he broached the idea in a message to a Facebook friend at Partners in Health.

Lorsbach, who also is chief of pathology at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, has worked to improve health care systems in Haiti since 2004. In 2008 he was one of just five pathologists chosen nationwide to receive a College of American Pathologists Foundation Humanitarian Grant Award.

Simpson is chairman of the Department of Laboratory Sciences in the UAMS College of Health Related Professions. For the past five years he has helped develop cytotechnology and medical technology training programs in Namibia, Africa. Cytotechnologists and medical technologists work closely with pathologists to detect cancer and other diseases.

The grant will help train four to six cytotechnologists to screen for cervical cancer, and it will support the purchase of microscopes and colposcopes (a device that allows gynecologists to see the cervix when examining patients), and fund future personnel exchanges between UAMS and Haiti.

Many women in Haiti currently must walk six to eight hours just to reach a hospital that provides Pap smears, and it can take up to two months to get the test results. Such a delay virtually assures that most patients won’t return for a follow-up because it is so difficult, Lorsbach said.

“Don and I decided we could provide some training here at UAMS and, more importantly, help to create a training program in Haiti to develop capacity to screen Pap smears, with the ultimate goal of delivering accurate results much more rapidly,” Lorsbach said. “This will clearly contribute to patient care and help to minimize patients being lost to follow-up.”

A member of the College of American Pathologists Foundation, Matthew Zarka, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., said the UAMS laboratory training program is exactly the type of project the foundation’s Haiti Relief Effort Task Force has been looking to support.

“This project addresses acute health care needs of the women of Haiti, establishes an in-country clinical and cytopathology laboratory teaching program, and is a long-term sustainable effort, in partnership with Partners in Health, a well-established humanitarian NGO (nongovernmental organization), which has been on the ground in Haiti for decades,” Zarka said.

For Joachim and Alexandre, the UAMS visit is their first chance to see a clinical lab outside Haiti and to gain expertise and awareness of modern clinical lab practices.

Both are spending five weeks rotating through sections of the clinical lab, including microbiology, chemistry and hematology. They also are interacting with the lab specialists and receiving formal lectures in laboratory management.

One of the goals is to have them ready for a new 320-bed teaching hospital that is being built in the town of Mirebalais.

“As we go forward, we will help them develop the lab in the Mirebalais hospital and continue a long-term partnership with them in helping them to develop better laboratory management practices,” Lorsbach said.

Hunt is president of the College of American Pathologists Foundation, and Lorsbach also is a board member, but neither was involved in voting on the grant.