Every year, hundreds of employees, faculty, and students from throughout Penn Medicine volunteer their time and knowledge to help underserved communities. But this generous outreach is not limited to the tri-state area or even U.S. borders; they span the globe. For example, Sonul Mehta, MD, an oculoplastic reconstructive surgeon at Scheie Eye, travels to parts of Southeast Asia and South America, helping to restore sight to those who lost it years — sometimes decades— ago. And Steven Bergmann, MD, PhD, chair of Princeton’s Department of Medicine, and his wife participate annually in missions to countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America.
Although the global outbreak of COVID-19 this spring has temporarily halted much of this international travel, there is no doubt these longstanding efforts will continue in the future as Penn Medicine employees reach out abroad to help improve the lives of — and bring hope to — to those in need.
Changing Lives
Venus Cherry with some of the school supplies
he sends to Saint Lucia.
Venus Cherry’s long-term outreach to the children of Saint Lucia is very much a personal endeavor. As a native of the Caribbean island, he knows firsthand just how difficult life can be there. As the oldest of seven kids living in a single-parent household, Cherry, who is an instructional designer in IS, was the “man” of the family at an early age, caring for and supporting his family. Cooking, cleaning, and earning money doing small jobs for neighbors left him precious little time to attend school. But those were not the only barriers to getting an education. He didn’t have money to buy textbooks… nor sometimes even the bus fare to get to school. With his erratic school attendance, it was not surprising that, at the end of primary school, he failed the country’s common entrance exam to secondary school.
But then he got a second chance. Although he hadn’t passed the exam, he did well enough to earn a spot in a senior primary school. There the teachers saw something special in him, and made sure he had textbooks, a school uniform, and money for transportation. The next time he took the common entrance exam, he scored second out of 1,500 students on the island.
His life was changing. Another scholarship helped him get through secondary school and then, in 2001, he came to this country on a soccer scholarship to Bloomsburg University, earning not only his bachelor’s degree but also a master’s in IT.
Grateful to the many people and organizations who had helped him along the way, Cherry wanted to pay it forward. Starting in college, he began buying clothes and shoes for his friends and family and bringing them on his visits home. His first fulltime job (at Children’s Hospital) enabled him to buy more, for more people. He started purchasing hundreds of dollars worth of school supplies and shipping them in a barrel to his family back home. “My cousins would let the community know that the supplies were coming and then Skype me when they were giving the supplies away,” he said. “It motivated me to do more.”
And he has. With the help of friends and colleagues, he’s purchased more than 500 pairs of black shoes, a required part of the country’s school uniform that are sometimes beyond the means of families. On his yearly visits home, he now brings multiple suitcases, all filled with school supplies and clothing and shoes.
Over the past several years, Cherry has partnered with Gros-Islet National Youth Council, a nonprofit that raises funds to help the needy in Saint Lucia. He uses social media to spread the word and that in turn has led to interviews with the local media. “Even the Minister of the Government asked what he can do!”
His efforts to help have extended to visiting elementary schools on his trips home and talking directly to the children, hoping to motivate them with his own life story. “Education has unlocked many doors for me and now I am trying to help others.
“I think of where I came from — how poor I was — and I don’t regret one minute of it,” he said. “It made me who I am today. I understand what it’s like to give … and to receive. I will never stop.”
Restoring Function
Cheryl and Ken Arthur took part in a special closing ceremony in India.
In 2010, Kenneth Arthur, MD, and his wife, Cheryl, both from LG Health, joined his sister on a medical mission to the Philippines. It proved to be a turning point for them. Wanting to reach out on more missions, they partnered with others from the Central PA area three years later to create Operation Medical, a nonprofit that helps meet the medical needs of third world countries.
Including that first trip, the couple has now volunteered for 11 surgical missions in the Philippines, India, Rwanda and Nepal. As the only plastic surgeon in the group, Ken has helped hundreds of patients over the years. Many, he said, suffer significant scarring that stem from burns they received from cooking fires (often ignited with kerosene). The flames quickly catch clothing on fire, sometimes leaving scar contractures that freeze a person’s ability to move parts of their bodies. “I’ve had patients with neck scars whose chins now remain touching their chests,” he said. “Sometimes they can open their mouths to eat but they can’t look up.” Others, who burn their hands, can’t move fingers; they’re stuck to the palm of the hand.
To free patients from the scar’s tenacious hold, Ken releases the tight skin and sometimes uses a skin graft to cover the repair wound. He said that, unlike in the U.S., where specialized clinicians provide care in burn units, “these are procedures they can’t get done there.”
From their many years of volunteering, the couple has compiled a list of things they’ll need, such as travel supplies, medication for malaria and even toilet paper! Ken himself keeps a large suitcase -- affectionately known as “Big Blue” — filled with his necessary surgical supplies.
During outreaches, the OR beds are constantly occupied, starting at 7:30 sharp each day. Ken alone completes between 20 and 25 cases on most trips. “I can’t describe the experience. I’ve been in practice almost 30 years and this is how things were like back then — just taking care of the patient,” he said.
While the group’s clinicians provide the medical and surgical care, Cheryl, a project manager in IS, and other volunteers make sure that the nonclinical parts of the trips go smoothly. For example, she runs supplies into the OR when necessary, keeps case logs, and writes blogs of their experiences. But she can also be found holding the hands of patients waiting for surgery in the OR. “There are not always separate ORs in the hospital in India. Sometimes there are three tables in one room with cases going on simultaneously,” she said. “Patients see what’s going on as they’re brought to an empty table. I want to provide comfort … and a distraction.”
Ken said they’re always looking to expand their reach, for example, a trip to Nairobi, Kenya is planned for the future. “I want to foster interest in this type of work among younger providers to keep things going,” he said. “I want to ensure that Operation Medical continues to make a difference in the future.”
The Impact of Small Things
Robin Gibbs with an OR nurse she works with in Guatemala
When Robin Gibbs, MSN, arrives at a hospital in Guatemala, she finds hundreds of patients lined up outside, a scene that is repeated each of the five days she’s there. Gibbs said that some travel literally for hours to get there, often on a chicken bus. “That’s an old school bus that drives around throughout towns. It’s inexpensive … but you could be sitting next to a chicken.”
Gibbs, an acute care nurse practitioner in HUP’s PACU (post anesthesia care unit), travels to Guatemala every January as part of a medical and surgical team from Children of the Americas, a nonprofit that provides medical services at no cost to the country’s indigent women and children. This past January was her 16th trip. While there, she cared for the OR patients in a small recovery room that housed six stretchers and two chairs. She checked vital signs with a stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, and pulse oximeter. In the corner stood a full oxygen tank, if needed. Clearly, this “PACU” — in Guatemala — was light-years away from where she works, but the experience “reminds me of why I went into health care,” she said. This year, the team saw over 1,500 patients, which led to 131 surgical cases performed over five days.
Because of the large number of surgical cases they schedule, keeping patients moving from the OR to the recovery room and ultimately to the patient floor is critical. With limited technology, communication is done the old fashioned way: “Someone comes out of the OR saying ‘we’ve got two patients coming out’ and we need to make room so we don’t hold up OR cases.” Even if the stretchers are filled, they’ll find a way, for example, moving a patient on a stretcher who is able to sit to a chair. “We don’t want to hold up the cases.”
Gibbs’s positive experiences over the years have resulted in several members of HUP’s staff joining the outreach effort, including nurses from the CT surgical intensive care unit and OR, as well as an OR surgical tech. Gibbs said they’re all “repeaters. We have a really high retention rate,” she said. “My colleagues see how different things are outside of the U.S. and outside of an academic medical center…. How really impactful the small things can be.
“Some patients there would never have the opportunity to get these procedures done anywhere else,” she continued. And it makes a difference. During this year’s trip a young boy treated for club foot last year came back for a visit — running up and down the hall. Without this ability to walk, she said, “he would probably have ended up as an invalid, with no means to earn a living.”