When his niece in Ghana died of a childbirth complication, this N.J. physician made it his mission to save women in West Africa

In 2001, while on a trip to his native Ghana, New Jersey gynecological oncologist James Aikins Jr. arrived in his hometown of Cape Coast. There he learned of the cause for great family rejoicing: His 21-year-old niece was due to give birth imminently. When Aikins left Cape Coast for a few days to visit with other relatives in the West African country, he expected to return to find a happy new mother and child.

But Aikins came back to tragedy. The infant was born healthy, but the niece had bled to death from a postpartum hemorrhage, a common childbirth complication that typically is treated without negative outcomes. Aikins, who practices at Cooper University Health Care, learned that the hospital where his niece delivered her child had few doctors and only one fully qualified obstetrician. Aikins was heartbroken and angry, which drove him to look for answers.

“It made me feel like, what can we do to improve this condition? And the first thing that came to mind was to set up a program to work with the doctors [in Ghana] and [teach them] to manage these cases,” Aikins said.

Back in the United States, Aikins — who is also an associate professor at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University — joined with his physician wife, Charletta Ayers, an associate professor and division director at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, to look for solutions. Before the year was up, they had formed International Health Care Volunteers (IHCV), a grassroots nonprofit made up of New Jersey doctors and nurses who would donate their time, expertise, and finances to two-week medical missions to Ghana to treat underserved women and train local physicians how to care for them.

In 2002, Aikins and nine of his Cooper colleagues undertook IHCV’s first mission to Ghana. Since then, IHCV has provided medical care to over 15,000 patients — women, men, and children — and has performed thousands of major and minor medical and surgical procedures. In 2009, IHVC launched a similar annual initiative in Jamaica, and last year made its first trip to the Dominican Republic.

“My husband’s vision is just unbelievable,” said Ayers, who is Aikins’ mission partner. “We would be all over the world if it was up to him.”

Their care teams now number close to 40 people, including doctors in various specialties, as well as nurses, medical students, pharmacists, and even teachers.

“We’ve adopted one orphanage, which we go back to” in Ghana, Ayers said. Besides providing medical care to the children, the team supplies books. About 15 years ago, one of the little boys tried to return his book to the team when he was done with it. He didn’t realize it was his to keep. He had never owned a book before.

“Because of that, he went to school to become a teacher,” Ayers said of the now young man, who is in the midst of studies and visits the IHCV team whenever they are in Ghana.

In addition to direct care to ill patients, Aikins, Ayers, and their IHCV colleagues in the Ghana mission have instituted screening programs for HIV, colon cancer, and cervical cancer.

“When we started going to Ghana, one of the things we quickly saw was there was no organized screening for cervical cancer,” which is routinely diagnosed via a pap smear, a simple swab of the cervix, Aikins said.

Few local health-care providers had the funding or technology to perform pap smears. So Aikins said his volunteers began teaching their Ghanaian colleagues to use vinegar, a light source, and a basic piece of gynecological equipment to visually examine the cervix. (The vinegar will make abnormal cells appear to change color.) They were then able to raise funds for another piece of equipment to conduct a higher level of testing in cases where that initial screening warranted it.

An important aspect of IHCV’s mission is to support medical colleagues in Ghana through training, mentoring, and education opportunities.

“One year, we did CPR training for almost an entire hospital, a total of about 70 individuals,” said Ayers. “We have a project each year — something sustainable we can leave there.”

The couple and their team members have also mentored Ghanaian doctors-in-training. And Aikins and Ayers helped start and now teach in an OB-GYN residency program at Cape Coast Teaching Hospital. The location has special meaning for their family: It’s the same hospital where Aikins’ niece died in 2001.

While COVID-19 has, sadly, canceled IHVC’s missions this year, Aikins said the team will return as soon as possible. In the meantime, he and Ayers will use the internet to conduct their residency teaching as well as address Ghana’s annual medical conference.

Their hope is to expand their medical education efforts in the West African nation.

“As they say, you teach somebody how to fish, and they will eat forever, as opposed to giving them the fish,” Aikins said. “That’s our basic premise. We would like to teach them how to fish.”

The visiting American doctors — those starting their careers and the veterans — have been enriched by their experiences with IHVC.

For Ayers, going into a new culture teaches patience and highlights the need to be an especially careful listener. “And I think I’ve brought that back as a physician here” in the United States.

Aikins said the American medical residents who have gone on the missions have remarked how they’ve learned to do more with less, because of not having access to resources they’re become used to in the United States. Ghana and other developing nations often lack the sophisticated technology and equipment that is taken for granted in the United States. Working in low-resource situations forces physicians to hone their diagnostic skills, he said. They also become familiar with diseases they might not otherwise encounter.

“We learn from them as much as they learn from us,” Aikins said.

Michelle Bilbao, a fellow in women’s cancer at Cooper University Health Care, said her time in Ghana with IHCV taught her the importance of developing relationships with a community, as well as how to do more with fewer resources and still wind up with positive results.

“It was just a real growth experience for me professionally, surgically, as well as learning to interact with folks not of my background,” Bilbao said.

The IHCV missions have held personal significance to Aikins’ family in Ghana. His grandmother — a matriarch who lived to age 105 — would constantly remark on the good that the visiting doctors were doing in memory of the young mother who died in childbirth all those years ago. It’s a view the rest of the family shares.

“They feel that from something horrible that happened to our family,” Aikins said, “something great came out of it.”