Like many young adults at that time, the events of Sept.11, 2001, deeply impacted how Dr. Maija Cheung saw the world.
After living in Ames from kindergarten through sixth grade and then completing the rest of her schooling in Kansas, she was attending college in the Northeast at the time of the attacks. Her plans to become an architect shifted.
“It caused me to think more about global issues and just the world beyond the borders that I was familiar with,” Cheung said.
She decided to attend medical school. Work with the National Institutes of Health took her around the world, cementing her interest in global health equity. She worked in the Middle East, coordinated disaster response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and spent time in Peru delivering babies and working with tuberculosis patients.
“I started to understand a lot more about the need in accessing care and low resources and under-resourced health systems. That global health focus became one that I carried through medical school,” Cheung said.
She fell in love with the surgical speciality. She continued to work in areas around the world in need of more health care resources, working under mentors performing surgery, developing training courses and teaching local providers.
This led her to Kids Operating Room.
“I was doing work in Uganda about 10 years ago,” Cheung said “There was a group that was doing one operating room as a twin project with something in the U.K. After that one operating room, our founders had their own personal tragedy and decided to redirect all of their philanthropic efforts towards surgical access for children.”
Cheung is now the chief medical officer for Kids Operating Room, a nonprofit opening operating rooms dedicated to children in under-resourced settings. The organization also provides medical training and scholarships.
Cheung, while continuing to perform surgery at a VA Hospital in West Haven, Conn., and holding an adjunct appointment at Yale Medical School, took the full-time chief medical officer position over a year and a half ago.
The organization has built 103 operating rooms in 37 countries. They donate the entire operating suite, and solar power to ensure surgery can proceed in areas with trouble accessing electricity, to public hospitals where care will be free or affordable.
Cheung traveled to 11 countries last year.
“Sometimes I’m operating, teaching laparoscopy or minimally invasive surgery. Sometimes I’m teaching trauma care, but we really don’t have a mission-based model, so we don’t send teams,” Cheung said. “We’re trying to build something that’s really sustainable and that strengthens the health systems.”
Cheung said there are about 1.75 billion children around the world who don’t have access to safe surgical care. The organization establishes operating rooms specifically catering to care for children, allowing access to care for conditions that would be treated quickly in places like the U.S. but often go untreated in other countries and lead to devastating impacts on children and their families.
“It’s everything you can think of in general surgery, like appendicitis, hernias and then some of those cases with birth defects like club feet and cleft palates, which can really stigmatize children, keep them out of school, affect the families,” Cheung said. “There are a lot of downstream effects that being able to access care influences.”
When the organization began working in Uganda, there was one pediatric surgeon and no dedicated hospital rooms. According to Kids Operating Room’s website, the surgeon would have to ask for access to an operating room, and urgent cases would go untreated when he didn’t get space.
Now, the country has five operating rooms and nine surgeons caring for 20 million kids, said Cheung.
Kids Operating Room recently opened six operating suites in Lviv, Ukraine, to help care for the families and children who have moved west due to the ongoing war.
“It will be able to help create that access for over 12,000 kids a year,” Cheung said.
Kids Operating Room focuses on providing infrastructure that will last long after they leave the area. Supporting local nurses and surgeons with both training and college scholarships helps to keep the expertise local.
“It’s incredibly cost effective. It’s very much investing in the health systems themselves, because you’re adding to the local economy’s ability to care for itself,” Cheung said. “If they have a great place to work and the right tools and they feel like they can care for patients, they’ll stay. That’s ultimately what we want to see, the health systems of the countries strengthening.”
And Cheung has witnessed plenty of cases where a strengthened health system has had wide rippling effects. She shared the story of Dak, a young boy at a refugee camp in northern Kenya. He was born with two club feet, something that is usually fixed early on in the U.S. with casting.
“His family, especially his mother, carried him around for seven years. He wasn’t going to school, he wasn’t making friends. His mom wasn’t able to work, causing the family to be further in poverty,” Cheung said. “With the establishment of the operating room, he was able to get surgery and multiple procedures to fix his feet. Now he can run and play soccer, and he wants to be a doctor to help others.”
Cheung believes every child helped paves the road to a better world for all.
“We know that healthier children everywhere means better education, more stable economies, more stable trading partners, fewer humanitarian crises. All of that reaches our shores,” she said. “Although we’re talking in the middle of Iowa right now, we are not isolated. Caring for families doesn’t rely on borders. Compassion isn’t a finite resource.”
