Prunau Mimose Lector is a nurse supervisor in the MSF Burns Emergency Project in Cap-Haitien, in northern Haiti. Highly experienced, Prunau has also contributed to MSF's emergency response on the small but disaster-prone island, and recently led a post-operative care team in the hardest-hit southern region after the August 2021 earthquake.
My job is to support the nursing teams, to evaluate them and to make sure that they provide good quality of care in the hospital, in compliance with MSF protocols. I just strive to lead my team the best I can, and to do my job well.
Being a leader means being able to manage your team with wisdom and serenity, but also with a firm hand.
My team is very collaborative, and this is what inspires me most. We build up our capacities together. I always tell them that we have the same training but different levels of experience. Everyone must know their limits and those of others in order to move forward in the patients’ best interest.
That’s where I can have an impact, as we manage to do our work without weighing in with authority. When we reach out to communities in times of emergency, we seek to explain the work of MSF as an NGO. We tell them how long our intervention will last, we inform them that we won’t stay forever in the community, that our care is free, and that we can only encourage them to take advantage of the quality healthcare MSF provides.
During my last assignment in Les Cayes after the earthquake, when we arrived on 23 August, the Immaculate Conception Hospital was overwhelmed. Children and adults were together. People were arriving at the hospital after several days with infected wounds. I looked in the emergency room; it was upside down. People were suffering. There was blood everywhere. It hurt me deep inside.
My biggest role was to support MSF’s integration into the Ministry of Public Health and Population’s hospital there. It was very difficult to make everyone in the health system understand the purpose of MSF being there and what we came to do. In Haiti’s health system, if you don’t have money, you don’t have access to care.