Our History
Friends for Health in Haiti, Inc. was founded in 2006 by Dr. Catherine Wolf, who, for over ten years had served as a missionary physician and Medical Director of a large mission hospital in south Haiti.
Dr. Wolf and longtime friend, Haitian-American nurse Cherlie Severe, felt God’s calling in 2006 to start this new medical ministry in a very needy mountain area outside the town of Jérémie, on the northern coast of the southern peninsula of Haiti. Some Haitian friends had picked out the clinic site in a community called Gatineau, an hour and a half drive into the mountains from Jérémie. Dr. Wolf and Cherlie came down from the US and visited several times before purchasing the land and moving permanently back to Haiti in 2006.
One of the first things they did in early 2007 was to conduct a need and resource assessment in 16 communities around the clinic site. This proved to be foundational to their entire ministry and led to the opening of an outpatient clinic in August 2007 in a little tin-roofed house already on the clinic site. Centre de Sante de Gatineau was born!
The Original Clinic
Dr. Wolf and Cherlie established a medical record system with patient charts, a financial system with receipts and a pharmacy formulary based on the WHO Essential Drug List. They prepackaged the medications into small plastic bags and wrote instructions on them in Creole. They did patient vital signs, consultations, simple laboratory tests and minor procedures, providing care to patients of all ages with acute and chronic medical problems.
Both Cherlie and Dr. Wolf greeted the patients each day, informing them as to the clinic procedures and giving them education regarding various medical illnesses.
New Clinic Construction Begins
In April 2011, construction was started on the clinic site and included construction of a bridge over a creek running through the site, a storage building, main clinic building, laboratory/pharmacy/radiology building and a second floor visitor residence quarters. In March 2014, clinic operations were moved to the-new permanent clinic building and patients were seen four days each week.
Impact of the Gatineau Health Center
Since opening its doors in 2007, Gatineau Health Center has served over 25,000 individual patients with close to 100,000 total patient visits. With the exception of Medical Director Dr. Catherine Wolf, all staff members are Haitian.
The medical ministry of Friends for Health in Haiti has four cornerstones: Curative Care through our outpatient clinic in Gatineau, Preventive Services through our Water and Sanitation community development program, Livelihood Support through a Goat Program and Agriculture Program and Spiritual Ministry through individual counseling in the clinic, disaster relief projects and partnerships with local churches.
Underlying Principles
This is the Public Health model of care which is concerned about populations, not just individuals. As such, we are strategic in all of the programs we develop to be sure that they’ll have a positive impact and will be sustainable.
There are multiple determinants to achieving better health and we try to have a positive impact on all of those determinants.
From the beginning, we told local communities that, to the extent they organize themselves, we will come beside them and help them but we will not lead them. It is the community-based model, involving Haitians in making decisions and being a part of the solutions to meeting their needs. It is a model that empowers them, rather than doing for them and helps to counter the cycle of dependency that has been created by well-meaning people doing things the wrong way.
We believe that establishing relationships with our patients and local communities is the key to developing sustainable solutions to local problems and is the means through which our faith can be lived out and shared.
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