By Talya Meyers
In a hurricane-battered community in western Jamaica, nurse Joan Rosegreen sat down to take a young mother’s vitals – and was startled.
“Her blood pressure was exorbitantly high,” she said of her patient, a mother of two young children who had given birth a few weeks ago. “This was blood pressure that could cause you to have a stroke.”
Postpartum hypertension can be deadly, but the young woman was overwhelmed by the impacts of Hurricane Melissa, which roiled western Jamaica in October of 2025, and experiencing some cognitive symptoms. She didn’t want to be referred to a hospital.
But Rosegreen, a long-time triage nurse at a university hospital in New York who volunteers with the JAHJAH Foundation in Jamaica, persuaded her.
“She’s so young, and she has two children, and who will take care of them?” she said. “As a nurse, I am big on education.”
Jamaicans at Home Helping Jamaicans Abroad
The JAHJAH Foundation – the acronym stands for Jamaicans Abroad Helping Jamaicans at Home – offers a mobile clinic outfitted with a team of medical, dental, and mental health providers in communities across Jamaica each year.
But Hurricane Melissa, a deadly Category 5 hurricane that killed 95 people in Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, changed the equation. Houses were flattened by the storm, and communities cut off from aid and medical care, sometimes for weeks.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, supported by a $50,000 emergency grant from Direct Relief, the JAHJAH Foundation focused its attention on hard-hit communities in Westmoreland, St. James, and Hanover, parishes in western Jamaica, providing mobile clinics that reached more than 1,300 severely affected patients with a team of 80 clinicians and support volunteers. The grant was part of more than $11.5 in aid provided to communities impacted by Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
The needs were unthinkably high, said Karen Shields, JAHJAH’s director of operations. Traveling to the west in Melissa’s aftermath, she was horrified by the “massive devastation” she saw.
“People were walking around in muddy dirt and water that was contaminated by sewage,” many of them with open cuts or other physical trauma, she recalled. “They just looked shellshocked.”
Local health facilities were heavily damaged and closed. Those that were still open were overwhelmed by demand.
“The things that you could normally go there for, to the emergency room, they weren’t even doing,” such as caring for infected wounds, she told Direct Relief.
She described one woman in her 80s who had received orthopedic surgery on her feet shortly before Hurricane Melissa struck, but who hadn’t been able to receive follow-up care or clean dressings. When the mobile team visited her, she was in her front yard, trying to wash her feet.
“She couldn’t believe that someone came all the way there to take care of her,” Shields recalled.
Injured and infected feet and legs were common, Rosegreen recalled, and providers were worried about sepsis. One young woman cried from the pain when clinicians tried to touch her feet.
Although Rosegreen is a long-term JAHJAH volunteer, she said caring for patients after the hurricane “was a totally different experience.”
Rosegreen was in Jamaica when Hurricane Melissa hit. What her patients have experienced makes perfect sense to her. “For me, it was personal and traumatic, so to imagine what they went through” is natural, she said.
Dr. Lauren-Paige Reid, a physician who also specializes in mental health care, said the greatest needs were wound care, management for chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension, dental care for cavities and infections, and mental health support.
“Unsure What the Future Would Look Like”
Patients showed her houses that had been flattened by hurricane winds and flooded out. “These were persons who were actually just unsure what the future would look like,” she said.
Dr. Reid provided both primary and mental healthcare. Clinicians screened for mental health issues when providing routine care for the patients at mobile clinics, she explained.
Mental health needs were widespread. But while Dr. Reid noted a few cases of more severe mental health disorders – such as a teenager with severe depression caused by the stress of the hurricane who needed to be transferred to a hospital – she said most patients just needed short-term psychotherapy, some help with coping skills, and “just an ear to hear some of their concerns.”
The mere fact that clinicians had come to care for them was often what patients found most meaningful, she told Direct Relief.
One woman in her 90s came to a mobile clinic to ask for a checkup. She was concerned about her chronic hypertension, and “she was just a little bit worried about what the future would hold for her,” Dr. Reid recalled.
“You Took Care of Me”
She conducted an exam, offered some informal support, and gave her patient a blood pressure machine and a care package. “It might have been small compared to what she was going through,” Dr. Reid said. “Butâ¦just seeing her smile really stuck with me.”
Both Rosegreen and Dr. Reid described following up with patients in the weeks after the mobile clinics were completed.
“The resilience was really what stood out to me, how much these persons are willing to push past their existing state of devastation to look forward to the future,” Dr. Reid said.
Rosegreen was impatient to return to Jamaica in April so she could follow up. “I will know exactly about the progress of my patients that I saw,” she explained. “Patients will come back and say, âYou took care of me.’”
In a New York hospital setting, Rosegreen elects to work in an underserved, primarily Black and brown community: “We have better resources [than I have volunteering in mobile clinics], but there are significant health disparities.”
Still, many of the tenets of care – such as educating her patients about caring for their health – are the same. And Rosegreen values the ability to provide in-the-field community medicine when she volunteers with the JAHJAH Foundation.
“It’s a totally different experience there,” she said. “It gives me the best of both worlds.”