Drs. Lamin and Jacqueline Bangura are a husband and wife team and parents of five. They founded Cape Sierra Clinic in October 2016 to serve families in Nashville and the surrouding communities with quality, affordable, and comprehensive healthcare.
Dr. Lamin Bangura comes from a large farming family in Rowollon, a small village in Sierra Leone, West Africa, with no medical facilities. He aspired to become a healthcare provider from childhood, as he looked up to the village “medicine man”. He graduated in 1980 from the National School of Nursing. He worked as a Public Health Nurse traveling from one village to the next, serving the people in provision of their preventive health needs. He then went to Cuba to advance his career in Medicine.
Upon graduation in 1989 with the Doctor of Medicine degree from Instituto Superior De Ciencias Médicas de Villa Clara, Cuba, he became the first college graduate and physician from his family. Upon completion of his degree, he went on to Havana, Cuba to complete a fellowship in Tropical Medicine in 1990 at Instituto de Medicina Tropical “Pedro Kouri”.
He then returned to Sierra Leone where he applied his knowledge of Tropical Medicine in giving back to the country. He came to the United States in 1992 and settled in Dallas, Texas. While utilizing his knowledge as a public health nurse and generalist physician fluent in Spanish, he worked as a healthcare advocate for the Hispanic population in the Dallas and surrounding communities.
After several years, he moved to Tennessee to serve a residency through Meharry Medical College at Nashville General Hospital. He was elected to a leadership position during the course of this program and graduated in 2005 as the Chief Resident of his graduating class. He has since then worked in clinics and emergency rooms in the Nashville and surrounding communities. He is licensed in the State of Tennessee and Board Certified by the American Academy of Family Physicians. Dr. Lamin is fluent in English, Spanish, Krio, and Susu.
Dr. Jacqueline Bangura is from the vibrant capitol city of Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa. Her passion for bettering her community largely stems from the inspiration and guidance of her parents. Her father was a United Methodist minister and her mother a police detective and Interpol officer, both of whom always encouraged their daughter to pursue her educational dreams. She immigrated to the U.S. in 1980 to pursue her college education.
She attended The Ohio State University, from where she graduated in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry. After working with the hazards of industrial chemicals for five years, she realized her true passion was in healthcare. She then moved down south and enrolled at Emory University in Georgia, from where she received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 1992.
She spent the next 20 years working as a Registered Nurse in intensive care and emergency settings in Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee. During the course of her work in critical care, she realized the need to move into a primary care setting in the community, where she would focus on implementing preventive health measures in the community with the goal of reducing hospitalization rates.
She then attended Middle Tennessee State University from where she received a Master of Science in Nursing in 2011, with a focus as a Family Nurse Practitioner. She worked as a Family Nurse Practitioner both in Primary Care as well as in Retail Clinic settings throughout Middle Tennessee. During this time, she also pursued her doctoral studies and graduated with the degree of Doctor of Nursing Practice from Vanderbilt University in 2013. She is licensed in the State of Tennessee and is Board Certified by the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners. Dr. Jackie is fluent in English and Krio.