One year after Turkey and Syria were rocked by two powerful earthquakes in February 2023, hundreds of thousands of victims were still displaced from their homes, with many families forced to live with stunted access to basic healthcare and running water.
As an experienced disaster relief volunteer, Dr. Prerna Mona Khanna, a qualified medical examiner (QME), knew that she had skills that would make a difference in the lives of those living in such vulnerable conditions. So, in January 2024, Khanna traveled to the Hatay Province in Turkey for one week to provide medical assistance to those in need—a selfless decision that illustrated once again why Khanna was named Barton Associates’ Locum Hero in 2021.
“Typically [disasters] are taken care of in under a year, where people can rebuild their homes or they move into new homes with insurance money,” Khanna said. “The fact that there are still one million displaced people after a year just goes to show you how devastating it was for that area.”
Khanna’s trip to Turkey is just one more in a long list of volunteer excursions she’s taken throughout her career. She’s provided critical medical services in Japan after the Great Tohoku earthquake in 2011, in Haiti after its destructive earthquake in 2010, and even in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak of the mid 2010s, just to name a few.
Packing up and flying to another country is no simple task for anyone, but Khanna says that her hybrid schedule of running her own worker’s compensation practices and working as a locum tenens provider give her the flexibility to take on these lifesaving volunteer experiences.
“There doesn’t necessarily have to be a disaster that just happened—even though that is kind of the brunt of the work I do,” she said. “Every country, including the United States, by the way, has opportunities to get involved where you can contribute charity work.”
Busy Since Becoming the 2021 Locum Hero
Since Khanna won Barton’s Locum Hero award in 2021, she said she’s been doing “great,” working a flexible day job at her 10 private worker’s compensation practices across southern California. There, she works in occupational medicine, treating injured workers and conducting comprehensive examinations of complex worker injuries.
She did take on a workers compensation and occupational medicine medical director at one of her local hospitals, but she quickly realized working so closely with administration wasn’t for her.
Khanna’s been an on-and-off locum tenens provider since she finished her third residency in 1998, but she admittedly hasn’t had the opportunity to take a locum tenens assignment since partway through the COVID-19 pandemic. She did work in a California prison as a locum tenens physician from the fall of 2019 to the end of 2020, but has been inundated with workers’ compensation duties since.
However, now that she’s almost caught up on the backlog of workers’ compensation claims from during the COVID-19 pandemic, Khanna said that now she’s in her “revenge COVID travel phase,” with aspirations to take on more locum tenens and volunteering work in the future.
“One of the reasons that I like doing the workers’ comp work is because I have a very flexible schedule and it allows me time to give back, which is what I like to do with locum tenens,” she said.
Disaster Relief and Humanitarian Aid Volunteering
Khanna’s flexible schedule provided her with the opportunity to take one week to travel to Turkey to provide humanitarian aid in early 2024. According to Khanna, thousands of displaced people live in “container homes,” which she described as big boxes separated by artificial walls for rooms where people use space heaters as their only source of warmth.
“We learned that earthquakes are still happening every day,” she said. “People are still scared. I talked to people who lived in the house during the day but then at night they dont want to be in the house in case an earthquake comes and it’s a split-second collapse of the house. So they’re still sleeping in tents outside of the house.”
Khanna’s responsibilities while in Turkey changed as needs arose—for example, one day she shadowed a local doctor to help out caring for local residents, while the next she was traveling to another small town to set up a pop-up clinic for those who needed care.
“You’re there for an intense period of time, but it’s a short period of time, so you can work that hard. It’s a sprint, not a marathon,” she said. “People are just so receptive to doctors from America coming because they know they are going to get excellent care in this type of precarious situation where maybe their own doctors who are probably also very excellent had a break in the supply chain of medicine.”
This break in the supply chain goes further than just medicine and medical equipment—for some people in Turkey, they lost continuity of care that they had come to rely on as their doctors were no longer available to provide it.
“Many told us how badly their care was disrupted,” she said. “There were two women in my group and so I was glad for that because I actually did some breast exams and things like that because the care was so disrupted that women hadn’t been able to get even wellness or preventive-type care.”
Turkey isn’t the last place Khanna’s visited to provide humanitarian aid. In fact, she just returned from Brussels, Belgium after caring for displaced people fleeing Ukraine after Russia’s ongoing invasion of the country.
What Makes a Great Locum Hero?
As a previous winner of the Locum Heroes campaign, Khanna now serves as a judge for new nominations. There are a lot of hard and soft skills that can make someone a great Locum Hero, Khanna said, but what she really looks for in a nomination is evidence that the person has a long-term commitment to giving back as a locum tenens provider.
“What I do look for is a long-term commitment,” she said. “Someone could really have a great locum tenens experience for four weeks and do a yeoman’s job attending to the underserved somewhere where it’s hard to get doctors to provide care, but that’s not enough for me. I need to see that they’ve done it consistently, on a regular basis.”
If anyone should serve as an inspiration to those looking to become Barton Associates’ next Locum Hero, it’s Khanna. In fact, 2024 marks her 25th year working in disaster and humanitarian volunteering.
“[This contest] really puts the spotlight on how the people who are dedicated to this type of work really feel about it, and why you should then also see if you can commit to it,” she said.
Check back on Thursday, August 15th to learn who’s named our 2024 Locum Hero!
