Cabrini Brighton breast surgeon Dr Jasmina Kevric arrived in Australia as a refugee when she was a teenager, and she is now giving back to a cause close to her heart, providing pro bono work at the Cabrini Asylum Seeker and Refugee Health Hub.

As a child, Jasmina witnessed firsthand the horrors of war in her homeland, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She and her family escaped the conflict, but witnessing a missile crash down on her family home before she fled, forever changed the course of her life.

“I saw lots of blood,” Jasmina told SBS World News on the eve of Refugee Week. “I saw my family on the floor. My grandma, I saw her lying on the floor in a pool of blood. My grandfather was on top of my brother protecting him. There was blood on both of them.

“My dad had blood running down his face. I was standing on the stairs looking down at the medics doing CPR and stopping the blood and providing pressure on the bleeding parts of my family.

“I remember looking at those medics and thinking ‘one day I want to be like that. I want to be able to provide this help to those most vulnerable’.”

Jasmina worked hard, learning English and earning a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Melbourne. She trained as a surgeon, before later specialising as a breast cancer surgeon.

Now, Jasmina is offering pro bono support to refugees out of our Cabrini Asylum Seeker and Refugee Health Hub. Her lived experience will be invaluable to the 20 or so new referrals to the program every month, Hub Clinical Director, Professor Suresh Sundram said.

“Any specialists who’ve got an experience of a refugee background more sensitively manage and deal with the sorts of complexities that asylum seekers and refugees present,” Prof Sundram said.

“(Our clients) may not access or recognise health issues that are important. This is particularly sensitive for mental health problems where mental health literacy may be very limited. We also have to deal with the problems of language where people may not be fluent in English.

“And of course, their backgrounds: their torture and trauma background, their pre-migration experiences of conflict, which forced them to flee in the first instance, their migration journeys, which may be very harrowing.”

The Cabrini Asylum Seeker and Refugee Health Hub focuses on providing free, compassionate primary care and mental health care to people seeking asylum who are Medicare-ineligible or who have limited/no income.  Sixty percent of clients who attend our services are not eligible for Medicare, and the majority have no income, income support or work rights and have been waiting between 5-10 years for the outcome of their protection claim.

This Refugee Week, learn more about Jasmina’s story and the work behind our Asylum Seeker and Refugee Health Hub from the SBS World News online coverage.

Watch Dr Jasmina Kevric’s story