When Dr. Anne-Marie Johnrose-Brown arrived on the Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica two weeks after 2017’s Hurricane Maria, she found catastrophic destruction. “It was like a forest that had been burned down to the ground,” she recalls. “The infrastructure was completely gone, agriculture was completely gone, it was complete devastation.”

Though born in Dominica, Johnrose-Brown was working in Florida as a family medicine physician when the Category 5 storm struck her native island on September 17, 2017, with winds over 170 mph. The storm dumped up to 23 inches of rain, triggering flash floods, landslides, and a meter-high storm surge along the coast. At least 30 people were killed and 34 more were reported missing.

Johnrose-Brown and two other Dominica natives – Shanita Scotland, a pediatric ER and ICU nurse in New York, and Corinne Francis, a Texas healthcare executive – felt called to help their homeland. Francis secured a donation of medicines and medical supplies, and Johnrose-Brown and Scotland headed to the battered island with 30 other medical professionals of Caribbean origin.

Even getting to Dominica was a challenge. With the island’s airport shut down by the storm, Scotland flew to the island of St. Lucia, chartered a historic pirate ship (by then retired from plundering and used for party cruises) and then steamed for 4.5 hours to Dominica. Johnrose-Brown flew via Antigua and then traveled two hours by boat.

“We found a lot of patients who had asthma who needed treatment, diabetes, uncontrolled hypertension, wounds, and abscesses hadn’t been taken care of,” Johnrose-Brown recounts. “The health centers were also devasted, they had no electricity, they were out of vaccines.” The team provided care for more than 800 patients on their first mission. A second mission from late October to November cared for over 400 patients.

After their return to the United States, Johnrose-Brown, Scotland, and Francis formed a non-profit organization called Medical Professionals on a Mission (MPOM) to respond to medical needs of Caribbean islands after disasters. The organization, which Scotland chairs, secures medical supplies and equipment and provides training.

MPOM sent a mission to the Bahamas after 2019’s Category 5 Hurricane Dorian became the strongest hurricane to strike the Northwest Bahamas in recorded history. With funding from Direct Relief, it secured a fully equipped simulation lab for the Dominica State College School of Nursing and equipped a health center serving Dominica’s indigenous Kalinago people with exam tables, a birthing bed, EKG machine, oxygen tanks, a medical refrigerator, and surgical supplies. It also helps critical patients seeking locally unavailable medical treatment with costs and logistics of seeking treatment in another country.

Direct Relief Backs Caribbean Rapid Response Team

With 2024’s Atlantic hurricane season shaping up to be as active as early forecasts had predicted, MPOM is using a $275,000 grant from Direct Relief to organize and equip a rapid-response team of Caribbean expatriate medical professionals working in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, all ready to quickly deploy to the Caribbean islands to help residents recover from hurricanes. The grant will be used in part to create the communications systems needed to coordinate a roster of volunteers who deploy to a stricken country, and real-time monitoring systems to track the availability and deployment of medical resources.

The grant will also fund training for MPOM responders and equip them with a broad range of equipment and medical supplies for emergency deployments. It also includes funding to cover travel costs for two response missions. MPOM secures emergency approval from local medical licensing bodies for its volunteers.

Direct Relief’s funding will help “to ensure we are a self-sufficient, fully equipped medical mission team ready to deploy to Caribbean islands post disaster,” Scotland says.

The volunteers lined up by MPOM include physicians and nurse with specialties in emergency medicine, internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, pathology, oncology, social work and psychiatry, as well as firefighters and police officers.

Relieving Local Health Workers

Medical volunteers who respond to calls for help from the Caribbean islands after a major hurricane aren’t just helping local patients. Their presence can be a salve for local healthcare providers, who may be overwhelmed by parallel crises: not only the long days of treating injured residents, but also the disruption of their own families’ lives and sometimes the loss of their own homes.

More than half of Dominica’s health facilities sustained moderate to severe damage from Hurricane Maria, “exacerbated by the disruption of access to electricity, water and waste management,” says a post-disaster needs assessment by the Government of Dominica. “All health workers were personally impacted.”

“We go into the hospitals to help with burnout, to give support to the medical professionals within those hospitals,” Scotland says.

Scotland adds that medical professionals don’t need to be of Caribbean origin to join the group. “We encourage all medical professionals to sign up,” she says.

MPOM is planning up to three deployments of healthcare workers this year. It is also able to provide other types of aid if the storm season warrants it and requests are received.

In response to Hurricane Beryl earlier this month, the organization shared emergency medical backpacks that had been donated by Direct Relief. As of July 15, it had not received a request from the affected islands to send personnel but was standing by.

Building the Caribbean’s Medical Resilience

For Direct Relief, it is part of a larger effort to help Caribbean island nations increase their resilience to hurricanes, backed by $12.6 million in grant funding committed since 2023. From that total, Direct Relief has allocated $3 million for health infrastructure including resilient power, cold-chain infrastructure for refrigerated medicine, medical oxygen, and mobile healthcare services, and $3 million to build a large solar and battery backup system in Jamaica for a central pharmaceutical warehouse, preventing refrigerated medicine from being spoiled during extended power outages

“Mitigating the increasing threats posed by hurricanes and other climate-related disasters is a top priority across the Caribbean,” said Dan Hovey, Direct Relief’s Senior Director of Emergency Response. “Led by members of the Caribbean diaspora, MPOM’s medical response team members have the local context and understand the needs on the ground in a post-disaster situation. In addition to providing healthcare services to impacted communities, the MPOM team will reduce burnout of local health staff, strengthening their capacity to respond and supporting the long-term recovery efforts.”