Quick Links

A Nursing School Grows in Haiti

Ruth Barnard is changing health care.

By Cynthia K. Buccini

A year after Ruth Barnard retired from teaching at the University of Michigan School of Nursing, her pastor came to her with a request. “He said, ‘Do you think a school of nursing could be started in Haiti?’ And I said sure,” recalls Barnard (SON’65). “Then he said, ‘Would you lead the effort?’”

 

Barnard, a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Ann Arbor, gave it some thought. She prayed. Then she got to work. Four years later, Haiti, a country with a serious shortage of nurses and a life expectancy of fifty-seven years, has its first baccalaureate-degree nursing program, with an enrollment of about seventy students. The first class will graduate from the Faculty of Nursing Science of the Episcopal University of Haiti in 2009. “I think God meant this to be,” Barnard says.

 

Though her pastor thought she was right for the job — he knew her through her work at the church — Barnard wasn’t so sure. She had spent more than twenty-five years at Michigan, retiring in 2000 as an associate professor. “I had not been a dean,” she says. “I had not been involved in international work.”

 

Barnard began by collecting information about the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and its nursing programs. She learned that Haiti, with a population of more than eight million and high rates of HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, and infant and maternal mortality, has only one nurse per 10,000 people (the United States has seventy-seven). She also learned that only a handful of government-approved diploma nursing schools produced a relatively small number of registered nurses.

 

She then met the director of a Haitian hospital, who had already secured $1.5 million from USAID and the Medical Benevolence Foundation for the building and dormitory and who had asked First Presbyterian Church for assistance in organizing the school. Barnard spent the next few years visiting the country, collecting more information and recruiting help from church groups and nurses and other health-care professionals in the United States and in Haiti. She organized a governing board, drafted bylaws, and helped develop the curriculum and hire the dean.

 

Of course, things didn’t always go smoothly for Barnard and her colleagues. They had trouble getting accurate information about the country’s health needs and nursing practices and finding up-to-date nursing textbooks in French, one of Haiti’s two official languages.

 

When she learned that the organizations that provided the grants for construction would not be funding the operation of the school, she established the nonprofit Haiti Nursing Foundation to raise money for nursing education. “I guess, as a typical nurse, I said, ‘OK, we’re going to solve that problem, too,’” says the soft-spoken Barnard.      

 

Construction of the school in Léogâne, about twenty miles west of the capital of Port-au-Prince, began in 2003. In January 2005, the dormitory and the academic building, which includes classrooms, clinical and computer labs, and a library, were dedicated, and the first class of thirty-six students was admitted to the four-year B.S.N. program.

 

The instructors are Haitians — recruited mostly from Port-au-Prince — who hold M.D.s or Ph.D.s in their respective fields. The curriculum, Barnard says, has more depth than existing Haitian programs and places a heavier emphasis on public health. “Nursing is different in Haiti than in the United States,” she says. “Haitians are taken care of by their families — that’s typical in third world countries. But our students are going to know how to deliver care and to teach families how to deliver that care.”

 

The work has been rewarding for Barnard, who travels to Haiti a couple of times a year and has sat in on classes at the new school. “It is true I did a lot of work on this, but I sought and received a lot of help from others,” she says. “It’s such a joy. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done.”