Story 13: Surgical Team Goes Abroad with Team Broken Earth
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Date: January 16, 2026
Speaker: Meghan McNeill (Care Facilitator and OR Nurse) and Victoria Bolduc (OR Nurse)
Meghan McNeill:
Team Broken Earth is a medical surgical charity. Nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals go over to countries, for us it was the Dominican Republic, where they cannot afford or access the care that they need.
Victoria Bolduc:
We provide that care for them.
[Intro Music]
Victoria Bolduc:
We're operating room nurses, but because we have such limited resources and staff in a foreign country, we're also logistics. We have to do everything pre-surgery, like getting equipment ready for whatever we're doing, cleaning it, sterilizing it, organizing it. Then we're also interop with the surgeons. We need to help anesthesia, and then we're also post-op, but not necessarily with the patients. We also have to take all of the equipment that we've used, and we have to clean it and re-sterilize it and get ready for whatever other surgery we have booked.
Meghan McNeill:
From November 2025, our mission to Azua, we accomplished in four surgical days 26 surgeries that included things like a fractured wrist, hardware removals, removal of screws, we did some ankle fusions,
Victoria Bolduc:
did a five-hour elbow, some really cool stuff, very old injuries or injuries that didn't come back together the first time, so non-unions, we have to redo them.
We always have our debriefs at the end of the night, and we're working with a team of people that we know, but people that we also just met for the first time, and at the end of a long day, these aren't just eight-hour days, these are 16-hour days sometimes, we all come together for dinner and talk about what we did and what we did right and what we can improve for the next day or the next trip, and that collaboration was definitely a highlight for me.
Meghan McNeill:
We had a little eight-year-old that needed to have his wrist fixed from a fracture, and it was very difficult to get the IV on him. He was so scared, obviously, he's in the operating room and he's alone other than with people that can't speak his language, and the anesthetist in the room wasn't going to proceed because we could not find an IV on him, and I proceeded and I found one, and he had the most beautiful smile on his face at the end of that case, and that is a memory that will stick with me forever.
In January 2015, surgical staff at Queensway Carleton Hospital joined Team Broken Earth on their first mission to Haiti. Team Broken Earth provides sustained medical relief, education, and infrastructure support to underserved regions. The QCH team has since completed five missions — three in Haiti (between 2015 and 2019) and two in the Dominican Republic (in 2023 and 2025).
In the video above, OR nurses Meghan McNeill and Victoria Bolduc reflect on their missions, an unforgettable patient, and the impact they’ve made through Team Broken Earth.
(L-R) Victoria Bolduc (OR nurse), Dr. Darryl Young (Orthopedic Surgeon and Team Broken Earth-Ottawa Lead), and Meghan McNeill (Care Facilitator and OR nurse)
A collage of four photos featuring medical professionals from Team Broken Earth. The top row shows three images: two of surgical teams in blue scrubs and masks performing operations under bright lights, and one of four smiling staff members in a hospital setting. The bottom photo is a large group shot of thirteen team members standing together indoors, all wearing matching red "Team Broken Earth" t-shirts.
The Impact
Each surgical team performs 25–30 procedures per week, primarily orthopedic surgery, with some teams also providing general or plastic surgery.
Queensway Carleton Hospital OR staff are proud contributors to Team Broken Earth’s ongoing impact, bringing essential care to communities with limited access to healthcare.