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Dr. Chris Bratton, at left, and Dr. Samuel Bada,center, perform surgery while on a medical mission to Ghana.

In the late 1990s, Samuel Bada, MD, was invited by the Christian organization, Storehouse for Jesus, to be the medical director for a mission trip to his boyhood home of Ghana, West Africa. He was an internal medicine resident at Meharry Medical College in Nashville at the time.

Little did he know that the experience would grab his heart and hang on. And hang on it has as each year for the past 11 years Bada has led a team to the mission fields of Africa to provide medical treatment.

In an effort to help defray the cost of these medical mission trips, Bada started the Save Africa Foundation Inc., several years ago. The foundation raises nearly $50,000 annually and accepts medical supplies and equipment to be used on the mission trips. The funds raised each year help to underwrite the cost of the trip and medical supplies, which are used to provide free medical treatment for village residents.

“There is so much more I would like to do, we just have to have to funding to do it,” said Bada, who ultimately hopes to have ventilation equipment for the mission trips as well as permanent locations for the clinics.

Since his initial trip in 2001, Bada has been the medical director for the annual mission trip to remote villages in Ghana each year. For many of these villages, the free clinics the mission trips provide are the only healthcare the residents have all year long. The clinics are held in different villages each year in an effort to provide the broadest range of coverage in an area. The clinics are organized by local medical personnel who work each year with the mission teams. Radio announcements are made several weeks before the mission teams arrive to allow residents from across an area to make the journey to where the clinics are being held.

“Every year we see different patients in the clinics although we see many of the same maladies each year,” said Bada. “We try to go to new villages each year so that we can spread the medical treatment as far as we can.”

Mission team members include surgeons, internists and general physicians, as well as nurses and support personnel, such as ministers and lay people. Many of the team members return each year, even though they are responsible for covering their own expenses. Medical supplies are either donated or purchased by team members and supporting organizations.

Team members travel each fall from West Tennessee and North Carolina and meet in West Africa for ten to 16 days, five to ten of which are spent offering medical care in the free clinics. “We usually arrive on a Saturday and clinics start on Monday,” said Bada. “Many times team members will stay for several days after the medical clinics are over to sightsee and travel through West Africa.”
Each team of four to five physicians, eight nurses and support staff see between 300 and 500 patients each day. “We have had several nurses from West Tennessee Health Care (WTHC) to join us each year,” said Bada. “I have also had the privilege of working with Christopher Bratton, MD, a surgeon from Lexington, Tenn., who has made the trip for a number of years. For the past three years, Martinson Ansah, MD, an internist who works as a hospitalist with WTHC, has been a part of the team.

“The physicians in Ghana can only do so much in the course of a year,” said Bada. “They are so stretched, seeing patients from more than 30 villages. In these parts of Ghana, there is probably one physician for every 100,000 to 200,000 people. So, most people have no healthcare except for when the mission team comes in.”

Although a wide assortment of maladies are treated during the trips, the most common illnesses are malaria, river blindness, pneumonia and other infectious diseases. The teams also perform about 45 surgical procedures each trip, such as hysterectomies, appendectomies and other acute surgeries. Routine vision care is also provided by the team, which distributes more than 2,000 pairs of donated eyeglasses each year.

“Our supplies are relatively basic, such as medications, antibiotics, sanitary supplies, needles, syringes and surgical supplies, such as gloves and sutures,” said Bada. “But we also distribute children’s clothing and basic school supplies, such as pencils, notebooks and backpacks to the village children,” said Bada, whose wife has accompanied him on the mission trip several times. “Many of these items we collect throughout the year at my clinic in Jackson. We also have several area church organizations that contribute items for us to distribute while we are in West Africa.”

“One of the biggest hurdles we have is covering the cost of shipping the supplies to Ghana,” said Bada, who practices at the Ultimate Health Clinic in Jackson. “We pack the supplies locally and ship them in 20-foot containers,” said Bada. “We also choose to go in late August to early September each year when airfare costs are the cheapest because each team member is responsible for his or her own travel costs.”

“This mission is important to me because I have been given so much in my life that I want to do something for those who have nothing,” said Bada, whose father is Nigerian and whose mother is from Ghana. “This is me giving back to my roots.”

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