FRANKLIN - Dr. Robert Lerer's healing touch extends far beyond Butler County.

The Fairfield pediatrician and county health commissioner is preparing to lead a medical mission to Haiti next week, after approximately 50 other trips to Central and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe over the past two decades.

At least half of his missions have been to Cuba, where he grew up.

"I've quit counting. It sounded a bit egocentric," says Lerer, 64, who visited Cuba in May.

As chairman of the nonprofit Caring Partners International in Franklin, Lerer has helped ship millions of dollars in new and used medical supplies around the world.

Cuba is his favorite destination, because he lived there as the son of Polish dentists from 1946 to 1960. He speaks with a Cuban accent, although Lerer was born in Prague in 1946.

"My parents were traveling by train from their native Poland to their home in Paris, and mom went into labor," he says.

His parents fled Cuba for Florida in 1960, after the Communist revolution. The family moved to Birmingham, Ala., where he finished high school at 16. After studying medicine at Johns Hopkins, and a pediatric residency at Yale, Lerer was recruited by Pediatric Associates in Fairfield.

Lerer finally went back to Cuba in 1996. For the past decade, Lerer and his wife, Janis, have traveled there twice a year through the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Cuban ministries of Health and Religious Affairs.

"Cuban doctors are among the best trained health care professionals in the world, but they have no equipment," says Lerer, a University of Cincinnati associate professor and a Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center faculty member since 1973.

Through his efforts, Cuban clinics and hospitals have received hospital beds, an ultrasound machine, microscopes, lab equipment, needles, syringes and sutures.

"When we're down there, we get lists of needs. We can benefit nine or 10 hospitals with choice pieces of equipment that hospitals here are disposing," he says.

Supplies are collected in a Franklin warehouse, which last year replaced CPI's headquarters in a 150-year-old former Sorg Paper building in Middletown.

On July 11, Lerer will travel with 13 people - including some Miami University-Hamilton students - to Pierre Payen, Haiti.

Fairfield and Hamilton Rotary Clubs have raised $25,000 for the trip, says Mark Koeninger, a Fairfield architect and Rotary member.

Until recently, Koeninger didn't realize that Lerer spends up to eight weeks a year as a medical missionary.

"Bob is very humble and spoke very little of his work, even to other club members," Koeninger says.

"When I saw a book of Bob's photographs of the lives he had touched over the years, I thought our club had a unique, precious resource we needed to take advantage of," Koeninger says.

The Haiti missionaries have three goals:

Examine and treat up to 3,000 people in clinics, and deliver about $200,000 in soon-to-expire medicine.

Set up a computer lab in an orphanage.

Scope out starting a self-sustaining tilapia fish farm next year to feed an orphanage and sell for profit. Pumps already have been donated by a Rotarian.

Lerer says he and his wife couldn't make an impact around the world without the help of their four adult children and his co-workers.

He has been honored with two lifetime achievement awards, as an Unsung Hero from Children's Hospital, and for being a distinguished pediatrician from the Ohio chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

"Somehow God has allowed me to balance family, pediatric practice, public health work, teaching and international medical missions, and still enjoy time off and good health," Lerer says.