UVA alumna combines science and culture to improve women’s health

[[Women’s health research: UVA alumna blends science with cultural roots to cut maternal deaths]]

Sarah Mills | GlobalBeat

Charlottesville native Amina Hassan returned to the University of Virginia last week to reveal a maternal health protocol that slashes postpartum hemorrhage rates by 38 percent in Somali-American mothers.

The 32-year-old physician-scientist, who graduated from UVA in 2015, built the intervention after watching hospital staff dismiss cultural birth practices her own mother followed. She spoke to residents and faculty at the university’s Center for Global Health, showing charts that track blood loss before and after nurses began incorporating traditional abdominal binding and oral ginger supplements into standard care.

Hassan’s work lands as maternal mortality among Black women in the United States stays 3 times the rate for white mothers, according to Centers for Disease Control data released in January. The gap widens for immigrants who speak little English and give birth in busy urban hospitals where midwives are scarce. Her pilot program, run at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Northern Virginia, enrolled 200 Somali women who delivered between March 2024 and February 2025. Only 4 required transfusions, against 11 in a matched group receiving standard obstetric care.

The nurse who checked Hassan’s mother in 1998 told the family to discard the red fabric belt brought from Mogadishu. Hassan remembers the scene. “They said it would interfere with monitoring. She bled for hours.” That memory propelled her through UVA’s biology program and then Georgetown’s medical school. She kept asking why evidence-based obstetrics ignored practices that Somali elders had refined over centuries.

Following residency at Virginia Commonwealth University, Hassan joined Inova’s obstetrics staff in 2023. She persuaded department chair Dr. Karen Blake to let her run a controlled trial pairing each traditional item with measurable clinical benefit. Ginger capsules matched the uterotonic effect of low-dose misoprostol. Muslin binders applied at 20 mm Hg pressure cut lochia volume by nearly half. Both fit existing protocols, so malpractice insurers raised no objection.

Blake told reporters the program breaks the stereotype that cultural competence means “letting patients do whatever they want.” Instead, Hassan built a checklist that residents can complete in 90 seconds. “We stopped treating Somali birth traditions as folklore and started treating them as data,” Blake said. Hospital administrators have already budgeted $120,000 to expand the model to Arabic-speaking mothers in 2026.

Word spread through WhatsApp groups run by the Somali American Community Association. Fartun Ali, a mother of 4 from Alexandria, delivered under Hassan’s protocol in October. She said staff allowed her husband to recite Quranic verses aloud and to delay cord clamping until the call to prayer finished. “I felt heard, not watched,” Ali wrote in a follow-up survey. Her hemoglobin dropped only 0.8 g/dL, against a 2.1 g/dL fall after her previous birth.

Opposition surfaced from an unlikely quarter. A senior midwife at Inova told supervisors the binding technique risked deep vein thrombosis. Hassan countered with Doppler scans showing unchanged venous flow. The safety committee sided with her after a 3-hour review in December. Administrators now require training for every labor-and-delivery nurse, 186 staff so far. Completion rates sit at 98 percent, Inova HR confirmed.

Money talks. Each transfused patient costs the hospital roughly $2,400 in supplies and lab work. Avoiding 7 transfusions saves about $16,800, offsetting the $15,000 Hassan spent on ginger capsules and custom binders. CEO Dr. J. Stephen Jones sent her a congratulatory email last month noting the “rare meeting of equity and economics.”

Background

Medical schools have taught standardized obstetrics since the Flexner Report of 1910 pushed American medicine toward European models. The shift labeled community birth attendants as unscientific and erased practices carried by African, Asian, and Indigenous populations. Researchers began documenting the fallout in the 1980s when studies showed immigrant mothers avoided prenatal care to evade patronizing lectures.

Virginia mirrors national trends. The state’s maternal mortality review committee found 63 pregnancy-related deaths in 2023. Black women comprised 56 percent of cases while representing only 20 percent of births. Language barriers appeared in 28 percent of fatalities. Advocates argue cultural dismissal is a chronic, not acute, condition.

What’s Next

Hassan flies to Minneapolis next month where the University of Minnesota aims to replicate her protocol for its large Oromo and Tigrayan populations. If results hold, she will seek National Institutes of Health funding for a 10-site trial covering 4,000 deliveries. The grant deadline lands September 15.

The broader fight remains. Hassan warned residents that one protocol “won’t fix housing bias or insurance gaps.” Still, she told them, measuring what indigenous practice already achieves gives clinicians a place to start. She closed her lecture with a photo of her mother holding her newborn niece, both wearing the red belt once banned. “Science looked like culture all along,” she said. “We just stopped calling it superstition.”