DR GRACE Santa Lucia, 42, is the only doctor working in the Claro M. Recto Memorial District Hospital in Infanta, Quezon Province, in the Philippines, for the past 10 days. She works 24 hours a day, has her meals in the hospital and lives in the hospital. The ground floor of her hospital is still submerged in mud after it was hit by the three typhoons Unding, Winnie and Yoyong just about two weeks ago. Being a local in the district, she herself is a victim; her house is completely destroyed.

The Memorial hospital serves a population of about 150,000 that includes nearby towns which were also hit, namely Real and General Nakar. It is now functioning with minimal equipment as most of the medical supplies were destroyed in the typhoon.

Dr Grace Santa Lucia attending to a patient with Dr Cheah Phee Kheng. She works 24 hours a day, has her meals in the hospital and lives in the hospital.

Hospital staff is also scarce because being locals, they themselves are victims, losing their homes and, for the more unfortunate, their family members. The one doctor and five nurses in the hospital manage about 50-100 patients a day. As we arrived at the Claro M. Recto Memorial district hospital, we were welcomed by the hospital nurses who were busy washing the intravenous drip bottles that they managed to salvage from the mud. The whole ground floor of the 200-bed hospital was still flooded with mud. The operation theatre, neonatal intensive care unit, labour room, emergency department, pharmacy, outpatient department, laboratory and X-ray department were completely destroyed.

Dr Grace Santa Lucia attending to a patient with Dr Cheah Phee Kheng. She works 24 hours a day, has her meals in the hospital and lives in the hospital.

The Malaysian Mercy team immediately volunteered to be on-call when they found out that there was only one doctor running the entire hospital. Dr Lukman Mohd Rashid, a general surgeon and lecturer from Hospital Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, was put on call on the first day itself.

With the three doctors in the MERCY team working together with the local doctor, each only needed to be on call once in four days. Dr Santa Lucia was glad that she finally had some help after so long. The team was staying in an abandoned ward in the same hospital.

Severely ill patients were sent by helicopter to Manila and this usually took a very long time to be organised. The patients had to be sent to the airfield about 30 minutesEwalk away and there about two to four hoursEwait for a helicopter depending on weather conditions. Equipment for transfer such as oxygen tanks and stretchers were not available.