Higgins Brothers Surgicenter for Hope

I grew up in a medical family, thus the Higgins Brothers Surgicenter refers to my father and uncle. Both were surgeons who practiced together for 36 years in upstate NY where I grew up. I am a 4th generation surgeon.

 

Medical School was at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, NY. 

Surgical residency was at Yale Medical Center in New Haven, CT.

Vascular Fellowship was at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas

 

After training, our young family settled in Kansas City, my wife's hometown. I began a private practice career helping initiate the Kansas City Vascular and General Surgery Group with my surgical practice focused at Research  Medical Center. I became a Clinical Professor of Surgery at UMKC helping train surgical residents at Research. 

 

During my 4th year of Surgical training at Yale in 1982, we were required to spend 3 month providing surgery at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti. This experience redirected my goals in life to help train 3rd world country surgeons who had little training opportunities in their country. 

 

Every year starting in 1990, I participated in a surgical mission trip through the Village Church in Prairie Village to the Dominican Republic to help train their surgeons. After the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, however, I redirected my mission efforts with providing surgical mission teams quarterly to help train Haitian surgical residents from Port Au Prince.. 

 

The original Higgins Brothers Surgicenter for Hope in Fonds Parisien, Haiti was completed in 2016 as we needed operating space for surgical training. In 2018, several outstanding Haitian surgical residents were invited to help build our Surgicenter into a 24/7 Surgical Center for trauma, emergency, and elective surgery. 

 

When we inherited a large medical clinic in 2020 that was ready to close, we tripled the size of the Surgicenter, added medical personnel and surgical specialists, built a medical staff living facility up the hill from the medical campus for our employees, and in 2025 opened our new Maternity Center. 

 

I retired from my private practice in Kansas City in 2020 during Covid to devote full time to building and training at our medical center in Haiti. We now have nearly 100 Haitian employees, and perform 125 operations monthly, as well as deliver 40 babies and see 1500 Haitian clinic patients monthly.