HEALTH GUIDE
A year later, Cardenas found himself on a plane to Japan. This time, it was following the tsunami that struck that country in 2011, devastating its infrastructure and damaging the nuclear reactor at Fukushima. “They needed someone with my skill set again,” Cardenas said. “My wife was starting to wonder — I had to promise her I wasn’t chasing natural disasters all over the world.” While Arizona isn’t the site of a natural disaster or a war zone, it’s a fast-growing state where people arrive in new locations before health care systems can be created, meaning that in many cases, companies like Exceptional Healthcare and specialists like Cardenas are building systems from scratch.
deployed to Haiti after the worst earthquake there since the 1800s. The initial quake was a magnitude 7, followed by aftershocks of 5.9 and 5.5. “It was a massive humanitarian effort,” Cardenas said. “I was one of about the first 60 people from the U.S. Army on the ground. They needed a medical planner and an operations specialist and that was my field.” He spent three months in Haiti, a nation with little infrastructure prior to the earthquake. “Our focus was to provide care for the troops who were on the ground,” Cardenas said. “A lot of what we did was repair buildings, and sometimes, those included hospitals.”
McVeigh knew he found the right candidate when he hired Bob Cardenas, who had recently retired as an operations specialist from the Army Medical Services Corps. Cardenas had experience in coordinating medical support for operations in many far- flung regions of the world where, in some cases, there wasn’t any health care system to begin with. “Sometimes it was a combat zone or for humanitarian relief or disaster assistance,” Cardenas said. Cardenas was stationed in Fort Liberty (N.C.) from 2007 to 2010. From there, he was deployed to Iraq, where he worked to support medical systems for the troops in Baghdad. In 2010, he was
Knights, an elite group of Army skydivers. She later served as medical support for the World Class Athlete Program, where she was onsite while members of the military trained for the Olympics. “You never really hear people talk about it but there are so many cool jobs in the Army,” Hamlett said. Filling a need When it comes to opening a hospital, the devil is in the details. From personnel to supply chains, there’s a dizzying list of demands to get a hospital up and running. To find people capable of handling such a gargantuan task, the Armed Forces are a good place to look.
80 New Resident & Visitor Guide 2024 • InMaricopa.com/NewResidentGuide
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