'Attacks on staff are common': Inside hospital saving Haiti's malnourished children

In a simple breezeblock and cement building, cholera patients are attached to drips as they lie sprawled on hard, wooden beds.

In one section, two young boys stare into the distance through listless eyes. They are very poorly, the staff tell us, but now they are here, they will survive.

Medical staff check on their patients in the relatively cool interior of the wards, while outside the sun beats down on the grounds of the rough and ready interconnected buildings of the Fontaine Hospital in Port-au-Prince. The hospital is built amid the slums in an area of Haiti's capital known as Cite Soleil - or Sun City.

This suburb is widely regarded to be the birthplace of the gangs of Port-au-Prince, and this section of the city has been violent and dangerous for decades. Civil society doesn't function here.

Indeed, the Fontaine Hospital is the only medical facility still operating in the gang-controlled areas of Cite Soleil. Without it, the people who live here would have no access to doctors or medical care.

How did gangs take over Haiti? Watch Q&A with Stuart Ramsay I'm standing in the cholera ward with Jose Ulysse, the hospital's founder. He opened the hospital 32 years ago.

It's a charity, run purely on donations. Mr Ulysse explained that the increasing gang violence across the whole of Port-au-Prince, and the chaos it is causing, means people are herded into displacement camps, which in turn means that cholera outbreaks are getting worse.

"Cholera is always present, but there's a time when it's more," he told me. "Lately because of all the displacement camps there is a great deal of promiscuity and rape, and we have an increase in cases." As we spoke, I asked him about the two young boys, and a small group of women on drips in the ward.

"Now they are here, they will be okay, but if they weren't here and this hospital wasn't here, they would be dead by now," he replied when I asked him about their condition. We left the cholera ward, cleaning our hands and shoes with disinfectant, before moving on to the next part of the hospital under pressure - the malnutrition ward.

"Malnutrition and cholera go hand-in-hand," Mr Ulysse explained as we walked. In the clinic, we meet parents and their little ones - all the infants are malnourished.

The mothers - and important to note - one father, are given food to feed their babies. Read more of Stuart Ramsey's reporting in Haiti:Children going to school in Haiti dodge gunfireListen: Reporting from Haiti's urban war zoneSoldiers face 'raining bullets' from Haiti's gangs Those who are in the worst condition are also fed by a drip.

One of the giveaway signs of malnutrition is a distended tummy, and most of these babies have that. Poverty and insecurity combine to cause this, Mr Ulysse tells me.

And like cholera, malnutrition is getting worse. He explained that when the violence increases, parents can't go to work because it is too dangerous, so they end up not being able to make a living, which means that they can't feed their children properly.

The medics and hospital workers risk their lives every day, crossing gang lines and territories to get to the hospital and care for their patients. The reason why this hospital is so popular is because staff show up, even when the fighting is at its worst.

Despite their meagre resources, the Fontaine Hospital's intensive care unit for premature babies is busy - it is widely regarded as one of the best facilities of its kind in the country. A team of nurses, masked and in scrubs, tenderly care for these tiny children, some of whom are only hours old.

They are some of the most incredibly vulnerable. ???? Listen to Sky News Daily on your podcast app ???? I asked Mr Ulysse what would happen if his hospital wasn't there.

"Just imagine, there isn't a place where they can go, everyone comes here, normally the poorest people in the country.