Professor’s global service honored by American College of Surgeons
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The humanitarian work of a retired Creighton professor of surgery was honored by the American College of Surgeons (ACS) last fall.
The ACS Pfizer Humanitarian Award recognizes surgeons who have dedicated “a substantial portion of their career to ensuring the provision of surgical care to underserved populations without expectation of commensurate reimbursement.”
Charles Filipi, MD, who from 1992 to 2023 served as professor of surgery in the School of Medicine, is the founder of Creighton’s Global Surgery Fellowship, which seeks to decrease surgical deaths in developing countries by training surgeons whose sense of mission calls them to distant countries.
He is also founder or co-founder of Hernia Repair for the Underserved; Chronic Care International, which treats diabetes and hypertension in the Dominican Republic; and a food program that supports some 75 street children in Ouanaminthe in northeast Haiti.
During ceremonies held in Boston, Filipi told how his commitment to serving the underserved began in 1978 when he and his wife, Frances Ann, consulted with famed humanitarian Elisabeth Kübler-Ross about their desire to open a nonprofit hospice center. Her promise that the Filipis would attract financial support so long as their project was “an act of love” became the animating principle of all their future humanitarian work.
Since then, a team of colleagues that has included their sons, Joe and Aaron, and their daughter, Christine, has built on the foundation laid by the Filipis.
Filipi joined Creighton’s surgical faculty in 1992. In 2004, he was persuaded by his son Joe to assist the surgical center at the ILAC Center in the Dominican Republic that for 50 years has worked in close partnership with Creighton University.
Our trainers are a distinguished group of hernia surgical experts, and they all give freely of their time
— Charles Filipi, MD
“I went down there to see potential patients and then later organized a hernia surgical team to perform surgery,” Filipi says. “A long line of sitting patients was waiting on the day of surgery. One of the patients stood up and gave me a bunch of bananas in an act of gratitude.
“It was a beautiful thing.”
Since then, Filipi told the ACS audience, volunteer surgeons have performed more than 7,000 hernia operations in eight developing nations, all without a death.
“Our trainers are a distinguished group of hernia surgical experts, and they all give freely of their time,” Filipi says. “They have trained 115 developing-country general surgeons to perform modern, effective open inguinal hernia surgery, and of these 115 trainees, 23 have been selected as trainers themselves.”
In 2010, in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake that is estimated to have killed approximately 300,000 people, Filipi, together with Brian Loggie, MD, professor of surgery at Creighton from 2002 to 2022, organized and sent surgical teams to the city of Jimani, Dominican Republic, located about 80 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake.
Their four teams, Filipi recounts, performed 776 acute operations and evacuated 30 patients with the help of the U.S. Navy and the staff of then-U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, HON’92, D-Neb. Nurses at one point were caring for 320 patients, Filipi told the ACS gathering, each one lying on a mattress outside.
And then, in 2011, Filipi learned that 75% of all emergency room admissions to Dominican Republic charity hospitals are due to complications stemming from diabetes and hypertension. In response, with daughter-in-law Linda Filipi, a certified diabetes educator, he founded Chronic Care International.
Two years later, in 2013, after being approached by Catholic nuns from Colombia, Filipi and his colleagues started a food program for lost and street children in Ouanaminthe, Haiti. For the past 10 years, that program has provided one large meal daily to the children Monday through Friday.
The global surgery fellowship began in 2018, and teaches subspecialty surgeries, anesthesia and ultrasound technology.
