Dr. Alice Benjamin, the beloved 80-year-old obstetrician and expert in high-risk pregnancies who performed thousands of deliveries over her career, has recently retired from her busy clinical practice.
To mark this special occasion, the Dr. Alice Benjamin Global Maternal and Child Health Fund has a new glow, as it readies to welcome to this world the second phase of a program that has been a blessing for global maternal and child health. The fund, which to date has raised over $500,000, was established in 2018 by a group of Benjamin admirers, most of them parents whose children she delivered, who wanted to fulfill her wishes of having more Western physicians learn low-tech techniques that have served the developing world well, as well as seeing physicians from low-resourced countries be exposed to some advanced practices.
One such project was led by Andrew Zakhari (MDCM’13), an assistant professor in the McGill Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, who began his career as a resident under Benjamin. He remembers her treating a pregnant patient who had severe pre-eclampsia. “She made a comment that this is exactly how the patient’s mother’s pregnancy and labour had gone. I was very confused until I realized that she had delivered this woman as a baby and was now delivering her child 25 years later.” He employs techniques of hers passed on to him and has often thought of his mentor’s “meticulous” style, as well as her inspiration and legacy.
Zakhari visited Rwanda for a month this past January, discovering a country that has a lot of things going for it: a 90% immunization rate against HPV, short surgical waiting times, low obesity and smoking rates, and well-trained midwives fully integrated into the hospital system.
Prior to his trip, Zakhari learned about something the country did not have: laparoscopic hysterectomies. No Rwandan surgeon had ever performed the procedure, which is less invasive than a traditional hysterectomy and results in a shorter recovery time.
With equipment provided by the Dr. Alice Benjamin Global Maternal and Child Health Fund, Zakhari and McGill OBGYN resident Rea Konci (MDCM’20), winner of the fund’s annual travel award, demonstrated the technique to the physicians at the Centre hospitalier universitaire de Kigali (CHUK).
“They were trained gynecologists who already performed hysterectomies. It was just transposing that skill to a new technology,” said Zakhari. A second operation was performed with one of the Rwandan doctors joining him and, for the third, the two local specialists did it entirely themselves.
“Everything went swimmingly,” he said, adding that afterwards there was a definite sense of triumph in the air.
Zakhari sees this as a great example of what the Dr. Alice Benjamin Fund does well.
“It’s not about dropping in and doing surgery and disappearing. It’s really about training people on the ground to carry the work forward.”
The fund has so far handed out 14 awards that were used for a variety of good works, including implementing point-of-care ultrasound in two Ethiopian medical centres, setting up prenatal and newborn screening and genetic counselling in Cuba, and developing community-driven strategies to improve maternal and child health outcomes in South Africa. Numerous McGill Global Health Scholars have benefitted from the fund over the last five years.
The committee is launching its second significant phase and a new push for funding during a trying time for global maternal and child health, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, and the recent collapse of USAID and other international aid.
Madhukar Pai, MD, PhD, the inaugural chair of the McGill Department of Global and Public Health and the Canada Research Chair in Epidemiology & Global Health, sees more than ever the need for programs like these.
“The world has slipped back quite a bit,” he says, referring to the time between the fund’s 2018 launch and today. He says routine childhood vaccinations are down, vaccine hesitancy is up, and laments the global upsurge in measles, whooping cough and polio.
But most worrying is the nagging maternal health statistics. “One maternal death occurs almost every two minutes. And 90% of them still occur in low- and middle-income countries.”
Pai, whose daughter was delivered by Benjamin, has been a member of the fund’s committee that tries to live by Dr. Benjamin’s principles. “Her desire to be of service to people locally, nationally and globally is exactly the spirit we are trying to carry out through the fund,” he says. “Dr. Benjamin symbolizes the best of McGill.”
Lorne Lieberman (BA’94), a key member of the committee, sees the Dr. Alice Benjamin Fund as a feel-good story that everyone needs to hear and that other universities could replicate.
“Who could argue against saving mothers’ and babies’ lives, learning how to do with less, and how to innovate when you don’t have the resources?” asks Lieberman, whose three youngest children were delivered by Benjamin.
“For McGill as a university, for me as an alumnus, you can’t tell a better story.”
He hopes this model could spread to other institutions. “Imagine Columbia University saying, ‘Hey, look what McGill did.’ And another university follows and it becomes a contagious story.”
He says he wants to shout the story from the rooftops and would love to have even more donors from those thousands of parents who have been helped by Benjamin, and to have them now help grow the fund.
Make a gift to the Dr. Alice Benjamin Global Maternal and Child Health Fund.