UTHealth’s Vinni Bajwa reserves time for military service

If you get an out-of-office message for Kulvinder “Vinni” Bajwa, M.D., there is a good chance he is out of the country on a military deployment in some faraway land.

Bajwa, 47, is an assistant professor and a member ofMinimally Invasive Surgeons of Texas (MIST) at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth and is also a colonel in the United States Army Reserve.

Past deployments include stints with combat support hospitals and forward surgical teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I’ve always wanted to be a physician and I’ve always wanted to serve my country,” said Bajwa, who provides surgical care to patients at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. “The Army Reserve allows me to do both.”

Bajwa, whose father Jasbir Bajwa served in the Indian Navy, is just back from a 90-day deployment at the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, where he participated in joint medical readiness exercises and missions with other branches of the military.

The mission goes beyond providing emergency surgery coverage on base and includes fielding requests for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (HADR) anywhere south of the United States.

Bajwa and his mobile surgical team treated underserved residents in four Honduran cities – La Paz, which is near the air base; Tegucigalpa; San Pedro Sula; and San Marcos, which is close to the border of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Bajwa said some of the patients had been waiting for surgical care for more than a year or faced multi-day trips to one of the larger cities just to get an appointment for a later date.

Bajwa and local surgeons offered their services to residents through a collaboration with the Honduran Ministry of Health. “I operated on more than a 100 people in just three months,” he said.

Those patients included a 12-year-old girl who had been given an ileostomy during emergency surgery to bypass an intestinal blockage and now needed the procedure reversed. “She felt much better and had plans to return to school after I performed her ileostomy reversal,” said Bajwa, who earned his medical degree from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Bajwa also demonstrated advanced laparoscopic techniques to doctors in Honduras. The benefits of these minimally invasive procedures include small incisions.

Multiple deployments can be difficult. “It takes a team back home to be able to leave my surgical practice here for months at a time. I am thankful for the support of my family and my colleagues at MIST. Without them it would be very difficult,” said Bajwa.

Bajwa is supported at home by his wife Nomita and their two daughters. He is supported at work by UTHealth assistant surgery professor Sheilendra Mehta, M.D., who takes care of Bajwa’s patients while he is gone.

“Dr. Bajwa has a lot of leadership qualities. He is very active in committees here at the medical school and in the Army Reserve,” Mehta said.

Mehta described Bajwa’s military and medical experience as complementary.

“Medicine helps with his service in the military and the Army helps with his medicine,” Mehta said.