C. Nicholas Cuneo ’15 began working with refugees in Baltimore as a medical student at Johns Hopkins, co-founding the Refugee Health Partnership in 2011, which pairs teams of medical students with recently resettled refugees to provide health care advocacy, mentorship and navigation.
When Cuneo returned to Baltimore in 2020 — after a residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, and a master’s in public health from Harvard — at the top of his to-do list was starting Baltimore’s first comprehensive refugee health and asylum clinic. To do that, he partnered with Nouf Bazaz, a clinical assistant professor of counseling at Loyola University Maryland, who focuses on refugee mental health. Cuneo also turned to the many Johns Hopkins medical students active in the organization.
Since late 2021, the Johns Hopkins, Esperanza and Loyola (HEAL) Refugee Health and Asylum Collaborative has been assisting people displaced from their home countries to find safety in Maryland.
People are referred to the collaborative’s programs, including its asylum clinic, through various nonprofit relief and legal service organizations. Since the collaborative’s launch, Cuneo and his team have received referrals from more than a dozen organizations seeking help for their clients.
When seeking asylum, the burden falls on the applicant to demonstrate harm. “Often, the best way to achieve that is through an extensive forensic physical or psychological evaluation to document any evidence of past trauma,” Cuneo explains. “We use forensic evidence to corroborate the reported trauma narrative.”
According to Cuneo, refugee experiences share one underlying factor: trauma.
“People come to us for a number of reasons,” he says. “Some are gang-related persecution and gender-based violence cases. Some are related to anti-LGBTQ violence. And some are really profound political torture cases, which we’re now seeing in droves from Ethiopia.”
Cuneo estimates that during the past year, Johns Hopkins has provided more than 80 HEAL collaborative volunteers to help in various ways. The volunteers include faculty members, medical residents and students — both graduate and undergraduate. Many team up on cases. “This is the kind of work that you really don’t want to do alone,” says Cuneo.
In what he calls “a full-circle moment,” the assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics is also now the faculty adviser to the Refugee Health Partnership he founded a decade ago. The partnership, he says, “was sort of the fuel that brought me to my current career trajectory.”
