Jim Ansara: Building Hospitals for the World’s Poorest

In 2009, after a successful career as CEO of a construction company,  Jim Ansara, 66, volunteered to help construct a small hospital in Haiti. But as plans were being finalized, disaster struck. “We were planning to break ground in early 2010, but the earthquake happened, and everything changed,” he says.

Ansara rushed to Haiti from his home near Boston. Thousands of people were trapped in collapsed buildings. The country's main hospital, General Hospital in Port-au-Prince had been destroyed, and bodies filled its courtyard.

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The original hospital construction project, which was spearheaded by the storied medical aid organization Partners in Health, quickly shifted gears. The situation called for a new hospital. Instead of the small community facility drawn in the blueprints, the new structure became a 205,000-square-foot, 300-bed national teaching hospital in the town of Mirebalais.

Given the devastated health care infrastructure and lack of governmental support, it was one the most difficult projects Ansara had ever undertaken. “I didn't speak the language,” he says. “We had no resources, and there were no supplies.”

Nevertheless, with his leadership and experience with logistics and supply chains, the job was done in three years. The Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais remains one of the largest construction projects successfully completed in Haiti since the disaster.

Digging in

Ansara’s boots-on-the ground experience lit a fire under him. “We talked about all the mistakes we’d made with the hospital and decided we can really do better,” he says. “I realized by the fall of 2013 that I needed to get back into it and see how else I could be of service.”

Ansara founded Build Health International (BHI), with the mission of bringing affordable, sustainable and high-quality health care infrastructure to resource-limited settings around the world. Over the past decade, BHI has built hospitals, laboratories and medical training facilities in some of the most resource-constrained communities in 20 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.

BHI’s next project was another Haiti facility, St. Boniface Hospital on the country’s southern peninsula, the country’s second largest hospital. The organization helped to establish an orthopedic surgical program where no such care had existed in a region of 2 million people.

“People have horrific orthopedic injuries all the time from motorcycle crashes, and lots of people, especially kids, fall out of trees during the harvest season,” Ansara says. “They had a tiny operating room wedged in with the X-ray machine and a bunch of other things.” BHI built a modern building with three state-of-the-art operating rooms and helped to recruit an American surgeon to train staff.