FMX Speaker Gives Back Through Global Health Efforts

“I remember being that child in a developing country when American doctors came to my school and provided vaccines or health checks,” said Allen, who moved from Jamaica to suburban New York when she was 11. “I always wanted to give back in that way and have that same impact. It felt like a full-circle moment.”

Allen made her first mission trip to Tanzania as an undergraduate student and later traveled to Nicaragua with Global Medical Brigades. She visited Ghana in both medical school and residency.

As a fourth-year student at Meharry Medical College, Allen traveled to Apam, Ghana, to work at St. Luke’s Catholic Hospital as a part of a National Medical Fellowships program. Students from the University of Ghana School of Medicine were doing community medicine rotations at St. Luke’s at the same time.

“Because of how rural it was, a few of us who were from the American program and a few of the Ghanaian medical students were all living and working in the same place,” she said. “We lived on the hospital grounds. We ate together. We rounded the hospital wards together. We were doing research together. It was a really rich clinical and research experience.”

On that first trip to Ghana, Allen also met her future husband, Joseph Akambase, M.D., M.P.H., who was then a student at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Ghana and is now an internal medicine resident at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis. (But that’s another story.)

Allen did research on hepatitis and raised funds to help St. Luke’s purchase needed supplies, such as blood pressure cuffs, stethoscopes and thermometers.

“These are things that solidified my interest in global health and really taught me that I could truly make an impact,” she said.

Allen will present a session Sept. 20 in the Global Health track during the Family Medicine Experience in Washington, D.C. Her talk will focus on the AAFP Foundation’s relaunch of Family Medicine Cares International.

“We had an awesome program in Haiti, but due to political unrest and the pandemic, we took a step back to evaluate how much progress we were making in our partnerships,” said Allen, the Foundation’s treasurer. “We had to take a long, hard look at our program and recognize that solid infrastructure was no longer there in Haiti. It’s OK if you need to pivot to ensure that you are building on solid global health infrastructure and building capacity. We want to demonstrate how to go about that process.”

The Family Medicine Cares International program has shifted its efforts to working with underserved Dominican citizens and Haitian immigrants in bateyes (also known as sugar workers’ towns) in the Dominican Republic, in collaboration with One World Surgery.

The AAFP Foundation made a site visit to the Dominican Republic in November 2021, followed by a pilot trip in June that included four days of delivering patient care, a one-day educational symposium for medical students and family medicine residents and a half-day mentoring session with final-year medical students.

Applications are open for the Foundation’s next trip to the Dominican Republic, which is being planned for Jan. 14-21, 2023.

Allen, just four years removed from residency, is slated to serve as the Foundation’s president in 2025.

“I want to encourage younger physicians, and also underrepresented minorities in medicine, to start thinking of themselves as philanthropists and leaders in medicine,” said Allen, a senior associate consultant in the Mayo Clinic Department of Family Medicine in Rochester, Minn., and an assistant professor at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. “It clearly requires a lot of hard work and a lot of sacrifice, but it’s important for us to get in the game and not be afraid to do what it takes.”

Allen also is making a name for herself online. She is an assistant medical editor for the Primary Care Reviews and Perspectives Podcast, an audio CME product. She also hosts the more informal Millennial Health podcast, which she acknowledges was “a pandemic baby” created in 2020 when her social contacts were limited.

“That came out of a need to connect,” she said. “I’m an extrovert. I want to talk to people. I want to get to know people, and I started doing Instagram lives. That was exciting, but I wanted to be more strategic than that and produce something that was evergreen.”

Millennial Health covers topics Allen would like to have more time to discuss with patients in her age group, including mental health issues.

In addition to her global health talk, Allen will present a session on physician mental health and suicide prevention with Christine Moutier, M.D., the chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Sept. 20-23 during FMX in Washington, D.C. That session will cover approaches to resilience; approaching at-risk colleagues who may need help; and organizational strategies that reduce suicide risk.

Allen said her medical school and her health system have lost a student and a physician, respectively, to suicide in recent years.

“I feel like it’s just getting closer and closer,” she said. “This is becoming an epidemic, and I think we need to start having some honest conversations about this. There’s a lot of stigma that remains. We need to start really looking out for each other and breaking down the barriers that keep us at risk for death by suicide.”