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Dr. Michael Opong-Kusi, of Morton Comprehensive Health Services, works to meet critical medical needs in Tulsa and in his home continent of Africa.
To Dr. Michael Opong-Kusi, being a good neighbor is more than providing the occasional cup of sugar. It means saving lives, both here in Tulsa and halfway around the world.
Opong-Kusi serves as the chief medical director at Morton Comprehensive Health Services, a federally qualified health center that treats poor, uninsured and medically susceptible patients in northeastern Oklahoma. A native of Ghana, he is also a volunteer and advocate of African Partners Medical (APM), a group of African and American doctors committed to improving Africa’s substandard medical care.
Here, Opong-Kusi shares his thoughts on medical crises at home and abroad and how his organizations are working to help.
African Partners Medical is an organization whose sole aim is to prevent needless death in Africa. Our main focus is to train doctors and work side-by-side with them and, out of that, to establish professional linkage so we can help them in their local hospitals. Volunteers work in the hospitals with local physicians and teach new techniques, go over problem cases and establish relationships so that even after their mission, they can be consultants through the Internet and personal telephone calls.
Doctors in Ghana are simply overwhelmed. If you have kidney failure and there are only six dialysis units in a whole nation of 22 million, you just don’t stand a chance. If you need a pacemaker, and there is only one cardiologist who can put in pacemakers in the whole country, you don’t have a choice. That’s what, to me, is so numbing.
A lot of people are focused on HIV, but the No. 1 killer of babies in Ghana is diarrheal-type diseases. There is still what we call a “perinatal mortality” — women giving childbirth with complications because there are not enough doctors or hospitals. Mortality from accidents is very high because there are no hospitals and no communication; routes are very bad. What I call the “usual, chronic diseases” are also there. We still have a high incidence of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and strokes. You also have a whole realm of tropical diseases.
What really amazes me is that the poor everywhere have the same psychosocial barriers. Even right here in Tulsa, there are still a lot of people who don’t have access to care. The statistics here approach that of a third-world country in some areas. That, to me, is mind-boggling. Working downtown at the homeless shelter and working in a hospital in Ghana are just the same because I confront the same questions daily: How do they get to the hospital or see a doctor? How do they get the medications? How do you refer them to specialty care?
My passion is the care of those who are homeless, whatever the reason. (Homelessness) is not an easy problem to fix, but there should be no excuse for innocent children who have to be in a shelter because their parents messed up. I think we’ve lost that ability to see there are people in our neighborhoods who really need help.
In my travel to Ghana, I was in Germany and Holland, where the perception is that if there is homelessness, the city is found guilty. We, as a nation, don’t seem to have the resolve to truly meet the needs of the underserved. I think it’s because we really are not trying to know our neighbors.
What I do at Morton is really just helping my neighbor. To me, being a physician is really a privilege, and that is why I enjoy serving the underserved.
