Meet Dr. Kern
Jeremy Kern, MD, is an attending in the Pediatric Hospitalist Division at CNMC. In addition to his clinical work here at Children’s Dr. Kern has been consistently involved in global health outreach since the beginning of his medical training, accumulating many years of international experience. While in medical school at SUNY Downstate, he continued his undergraduate interest in African History through a competitive Global Health Award. Through this opportunity, Dr. Kern travelled to a small town outside of Nairobi, providing clinical care at the local hospital. In addition, Dr. Kern served as the anesthesiologist for critical ophthalmological surgeries, traveling in partnership with the Kenyan surgical team to a refugee center in Somalia. This experience left a strong impression on Dr. Kern and has inspired him to continue his global health work, “it was a pretty incredible time. It’s the simple little things that we so take for granted.” During his time there, the surgical team performed an operation on an elderly Kenyan man, who had become completely blind. The team was able to fully correct his vision, restoring his sight. Dr. Kern remembers this experience and the patient’s gratitude as “remarkable.”
During his residency, Dr. Kern travelled to Malawi through the Baylor International Pediatric AIDs Initiative, focusing on providing pediatric HIV care to a community currently without access to this treatment. He appreciated the greater integration of this project with the local community, emphasizing the importance of local partnership in project sustainability. While there, Dr. Kern both provided clinical care and worked to educate and train local providers to ensure this treatment would be available to the local population even after his team left. The project had a “pretty profound impact overall,” in part due to “filling the void” of pediatric HIV care in Malawi, working to get kids on treatment, and preventing vertical transmission between mothers and children. “This care was just not being provided before,” says Dr. Kern.
On his last trip to Malawi, Dr. Kern remembers a young girl who was HIV positive, undernourished, and “just miserable.” As part of their treatment system, Dr. Kern and his team began a feeding program to combat the rampant malnutrition, exacerbated by HIV infection, among their pediatric population. However, Dr. Kern had difficulties convincing this young girl’s mother to enroll her in the feeding program. Worried about the strain of her absence on the family members she had to leave behind, the mother was eager to return as soon as possible. Luckily, Dr. Kern and his team were able to get the child on treatment as well as provide financial support and treatment to her mother.
Currently, Dr. Kern is a co-leader of the George Washington University School of Medicine – Project Medishare in Haiti through following seven years of involvement with the organization. The project is located in central Haiti, and is focused on providing primary care and improving medical access through mobile clinics that decrease patient travel time from potentially days to at most a 2-3 hour walk. Dr. Kern estimates the clinics see about 300-400 pediatric patients over the course of the four days it is set up. On the fifth day, the team does home visits, both providing care to patients who are not ambulatory, and educating western providers on “where (these) people live and the social determinants of (their) health,” says Dr. Kern. Each trip, the team takes about 15 GWU students from the school of medicine, nursing, and public health, as well as some additional GWU faculty members.
There have been some difficulties, however, particularly with a political environment as volatile as that of Haiti. This past trip, the government decided to raise gas prices by 50 percent, preventing the departure of the flight that would have taken Dr. Kern and his fellow providers back to the States. Dr. Kern and his team were undeterred, “I think having a firm safety plan in place is essential…this was unexpected, but the plan allowed us to adapt. We had 13 people on the trip and no one felt uncomfortable.”
Dr. Kern cites his continued involvement with the same community as a factor that particularly motivates him to come back, despite the challenges, “Medishare is able to build those relationships over time, improving quality of care and continuity of care…every time I go, they have built up a little more. Ultimately, my goal would be that I’m not needed anymore.” In addition to the chance to achieve a sustainable impact, Dr. Kern enjoys working with the local providers; “they have really helped us understand the culture and religion, as well as how to navigate these beliefs as they do impact our care. That’s something I have really enjoyed, and is also something I cannot teach my students, (only the local physicians) teach them that.”
From his “hundreds” of impactful experiences while in Haiti, Dr. Kern recalls especially fondly the “women’s day” the Project Medishare team set up a few years ago, “they did a lot of women’s health and I ended up seeing a lot of newborns and doing a lot of healthy newborn exams…that’s something we so take for granted, but my goal is always to practice the way I would here, to be able to say, ‘your child is healthy and is bound for great things.’”