Erika Havelka, MD, is a board-certified emergency physician at Illinois Emergency Medicine Specialists (IEMS). She serves as the pediatric physician champion for four UChicago Medicine AdventHealth hospitals: Bolingbrook, Glen Oaks, Hinsdale, and La Grange, and has played a key role in helping these hospitals achieve two EDAP certifications. 

 Recognizing her expertise, the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) invited Dr. Havelka to become a physician surveyor last year. As IDPH staff became aware of Dr. Havelka’s involvement in emergency management education, HAZMAT training, and pediatric care, they extended an invitation to participate in the Region 2 Emergency Management yearly conference in Peoria, where IDPH/EDAP is based. 

Dr. Havelka has been a volunteer physician with MedGlobal for the past three years. Before that, she volunteered with the Interstate Disaster Medical Collaborate (IDMC), which merged its international volunteer operations with MedGlobal three years ago. MedGlobal is a nonprofit international NGO that provides humanitarian aid primarily in disaster-affected areas through medical and surgical services, training, equipment donations, and advocacy. The organization collaborates with ministries of health, the World Health Organization, and other entities to deliver aid where it is most needed. 

During her time with MedGlobal, Dr. Havelka completed multiple assignments, including collecting donated medical equipment from the AdventHealth mission office and repurposing discarded medical equipment from hospitals to support surgical training missions worldwide. Additionally, she facilitated a donation of 2,000 pounds of food from Feed My Starving Children, which was shipped to orphanages and frontline areas in Ukraine. Dr. Havelka also successfully procured a pharmaceutical donation from AdventHealth, which was sent to frontline hospitals in Ukraine.

Beyond these direct contributions, Dr. Havelka has dedicated significant volunteer time to networking and connecting services. For example, when the First Lady of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health sought U.S. hospitals to establish long-term educational and clinical partnerships, Dr. Havelka facilitated connections between Ukrainian hospitals and institutions such as Emory University Medical Center, the University of Kentucky Medical Center, and Harvard’s Global Health Department. She also played a key role in developing mobile clinics in Ukraine by coordinating international pharmaceutical support, integrating telehealth capabilities, and organizing training missions to educate Ukrainian medical staff in ACLS, BLS, and PALS.

Most recently, in February of this year, Dr. Havelka served as a clinical instructor on a mission to train future trainers in HAZMAT decontamination in the Middle East. MedGlobal secured a training track at the MENATOX conference in Oman. Representatives from at least twelve countries participated in a course on the latest decontamination methodologies based on the PRISM study. These representatives returned to their respective countries to train others with continued support from MedGlobal staff. The training was explicitly requested by the ministries of health in several countries and has garnered increasing demand. In response, MedGlobal partnered with MENATOX, a leading toxicology organization, to expand toxicology education worldwide. Given the success of this initiative, there have already been requests to repeat the training in France, Turkey, and Morocco later this year.