Pregnant women in Haiti are being treated in a parking lot after the maternity hospital collapsed. (Medecins Sans Frontieres-Canada)

The president of the Canadian chapter of the medical relief organization Doctors Without Borders is working to get a field hospital to Haiti to replace hospitals devastated in the massive earthquake that hit the impoverished island nation Tuesday.

Dr. Joni Guptill, a family physician in Halifax, said Friday that a field hospital with two operating rooms is en route to the devastated country and will be set up near the ruins of the trauma hospital in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Pregnant women are now being treated in the parking lot of the trauma hospital, she said, and trauma patients are being tended to in temporary tents.

"At the time of the quake, we had three operational centres, 30 ex-pat staff and 800 national staff working out of two hospitals … and a health centre that we run," Guptill said.

"Unfortunately, the two hospitals we used to refer difficult patients to both collapsed. So, there is a very great shortage of maternity hospitals at the moment."

It's hard for many pregnant women to get to the hospital at the best of times, Guptill said.

"We set up the maternity hospital in 2006, and within a year, we were getting 1,500 babies a month and up to 60 per cent of those patients are high risk. There is a very high rate of high-risk pregnancies," Guptill said.

The field hospital is just a temporary fix, she said, and getting things back to where they were before the quake hit will likely take many months, if not years.

Guptill has been involved with Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins sans Frontières, since 1990 and has worked on emergency missions in Turkey, Somalia, China, Syria/Iraq, and Sudan.