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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Film aims to build support for trauma care in Africa
LAWRENCE — In his work with University of Kansas colleague and Oscar-winner Kevin Willmott, Matt Jacobson has focused on social justice in an American racial context. In Jacobson’s new project — a documentary about a KU Medical Center doctor’s effort to improve trauma treatment in Africa — the professor of film & media studies explores social justice in a far different realm affected not just by one nation’s struggles but by geopolitics.
A 30-minute version of the film, “Trauma: The New Epidemic,” will premiere Jan. 10 as part of the Great Wonders Uplift Film Festival in Joplin, Missouri. Jacobson has also submitted the film to the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri, and he hopes to screen a longer version at this year’s Free State Festival in Lawrence.
Meanwhile, his co-director on the project, KU FMS graduate Backer Hamada, has been using footage from the documentary to create clips for use on social media sites, including Instagram and Facebook.
It’s been a couple of years since Dr. Archie Heddings, associate professor of orthopedic surgery, reached out to Jacobson about his idea to help fellow physicians in Africa treat a crushing load of trauma cases driven by rapid industrialization and lack of safety regulations.
“There’s a lot of mineral and other resources that both the West and China want to get out of the country,” Jacobson said. “So they’re putting in roads and other large-scale infrastructure for moving goods, but there’s very little money being spent for safety or hospitals. If you’re doing construction and have rickety bamboo scaffolding on the sides of buildings, and nobody’s using safety gear and somebody falls, you’re going to have a sharp spike in trauma cases from that. It has become a major cause of death and injury — much more so than some of the diseases like AIDS and malaria that, in the 20th century, there was this hue and cry about dealing with.
“But there are many, many more cases of trauma going on – a huge spike in demand for medical services.”
Heddings had previously taken part in a medical mission to Ethiopia sponsored by a faith-based group. But the physicians he met in Africa told him that, while they appreciated the visitors’ efforts, what would help even more would be more African physicians and fully equipped, modern surgery centers.
That’s a tall order, but Heddings has already achieved certain miracles, coming back from paralysis and blindness caused by a car crash to become a board-certified traumatologist.
So he started by establishing a fellowship, the African Trauma Initiative, that has brought two African physicians for each of the past three school years to KU Medical Center to train in treating trauma.
But that is not enough, as far as Heddings is concerned. A follow-up visit to his trainees in the Ethiopian capital drove home to Heddings that, despite a skyline that rivals any American city, Addis Ababa has just two trauma-center hospitals to serve a nation of 120 million. Go the ER with an arm broken in a car crash, Heddings said, and doctors inform patients that they are “5,000th on the waiting list” and to “go home and wait for a call about treatment in a year or two.”
“They are completely overwhelmed by trauma,” Heddings said. “There is no substitute for the surgical infrastructure.”
KU has contributed know-how from several different academic units to help Heddings’ mission succeed.
Heddings’ operating room nurse, Lauri Spiresweet, pitched in by establishing an ongoing fellowship within the KU School of Nursing for African nurses that parallels the physician track. In 2023, she traveled to Ethiopia with two student nurses from KU.
In addition to Jacobson, Jacobson’s former student and now the film’s co-director and director of marketing, Hamada, and three other students also joined that year’s trip to film the documentary that they hope will be key to publicizing – and addressing – the problem.
Frank Zilm, a lecturer in KU’s School of Architecture & Design and a specialist in health care facilities, has worked up a plan for outfitting an existing building in Addis Ababa that was designed but never finished as a hospital.
And students from the School of Business have been working on a sustainable financial plan to operate such a trauma center.
But that will only be possible if Heddings can raise the millions necessary. So to support the entire enterprise he formed a nonprofit, the International Orthopedic Trauma Collaborative. He said he is already looking to help people in poor and developing countries beyond Ethiopia.
He said he hoped the film will bring at least some dimensions of the problem home to Westerners. For instance, Jacobson’s crew was recording when a power failure plunged an Ethiopian operating room into darkness.
Jacobson said he hoped the film will drive awareness of – and support for – the project to a new level.
“That’s why we titled the documentary ‘Trauma: The New Epidemic,’” Jacobson said, “because that’s the way that we want people to start thinking about it. We’ve had great success in dealing with yellow fever and malaria and dropping the incidence of AIDS. Now let’s start to deal with some of the other things that are resulting in shortened lifespans in that part of the world.”
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