prenatal care clinic, as well as a child growth deficiency clinic.
Gina Brown ’04 was purposeful as she pushed her way through the crowd of women covered in blue burkas.
Her mission was to get inside the primary care clinic she was volunteering at in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Service to others has long been a guiding principle in Brown’s life – a willingness to serve that she says she learned from her mother.
It’s what motivated her to help improve the health care of women and children and share her knowledge of women’s health issues and prenatal care with health care workers in Afghanistan, where the maternal mortality rate is the second highest in the world. It’s why she volunteers at safety-net clinics in Kansas, and why she helped out at a mother-child clinic and an eye hospital in Pakistan when she and her husband lived there in 1992-2002, before she earned her PA degree at Wichita State.
It’s also why Brown, who has been a member of WSU’s PA faculty since 2009, was recognized with a national award from the American Academy of Physician Assistants. Nominated by her WSU students, she received the AAPA’s Humanitarian Service Award in May.
The Kabul clinic where she volunteered from 2007-09 was a busy one, serving more than 4,000 patients a month. With no official appointment system, patients would line up before the clinic opened, hoping to get inside the heavy metal gate before a security guard would yell “Stop!” to the last of the day’s patients.
While there, Brown developed a prenatal clinic and taught prenatal care issues to several university-trained Afghan midwives, some of whom went on to share that knowledge with midwives at other clinics.
“It’s very satisfying to feel that the care, concern and respect are being spread further to these women who just have not experienced very much of that in their lives,” Brown says. “They should have that.”
