OSF Ignoring Need to Care for Former Haitian Patients

OSF ignoring need to care for former Haitian patients
Author: Dr. John A. Carroll

OSF’s 234 million dollar campus expansion in Peoria will include a new independent eight story children’s hospital. This is good for central Illinois children. All children deserve the best medical technology that exists; however, most children in the world come from areas where there is no access to any medical technology.

Unfortunately, OSF has rejected six former Haitian Hearts patients that were operated at OSF. One of these patients died this year and two others are critical now and need surgery very soon.

Haitian Hearts was happy to have donated over 1.1 million dollars to OSF-Children’s Hospital of Illinois for the care of Haitian kids, and we have offered OSF tens of thousands of dollars for the follow-up surgery that these patients desperately need.

The Haitian kids and their families that are being neglected by OSF are devastated that they cannot return for the care they need in Peoria. Who would have believed that these children would be denied follow up care from a medical center that says they refuse no one?

Recently the New England Journal of Medicine had two articles on teaching young doctors professionalism. A point emphasized in the Journal is that professionalism needs to occur everywhere in the medical center—even at the administrative level.

OSF’s resident physicians and the young medical students at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria are witnessing OSF’s administrative and institutional negligence of Haitian children. They are being taught the wrong lesson.
Peoria will have incredible medical buildings with robotic surgery performed inside but can still lack professionalism. Until this problem is solved, medical students, resident physicians, and most importantly, Haitian children will suffer the consequences.
John A. Carroll, MDhttp://www.peoriasmedicalmafia.com/