American Military News by Melissa Gomez - Los Angeles Times November 17, 2023
A 2002 state bill — which took nearly two decades to implement — made it possible for Mexican doctors such as Perusquia to work in California amid a chronic shortage of Spanish-speaking physicians. Latinos make up about 40% of the state population but just 6% of licensed physicians. The language and cultural gaps are felt most acutely in the vast rural stretches of California’s Central Coast and Central Valley, where immigrants from Mexico and Central America are integral to the farming economy. Hospitals and health care clinics that tend to farmworkers and their families routinely struggle to recruit and retain English-speaking physicians, let alone attract doctors who speak Spanish and Indigenous languages.
The Clinica de Salud del Valle de Salinas, a federally qualified health center that operates 13 clinics across farm country in the Salinas Valley, has taken a meaningful step to address the shortages. Clinic directors, in concert with health officials in California and Mexico, recruited doctors from Mexico and have deployed some to additional community health centers in Fresno, Kern, San Joaquin, Tulare and Ventura counties — all centers of agriculture whose farmworker communities have long been underserved.
Today, 24 Mexican doctors are working in these counties after being vetted by the Medical Board of California. The doctors specialize in pediatrics, gynecology, internal medicine and family medicine. If renewed, the groundbreaking pilot program could be extended and expand.
“This is something that has never happened before,” said Maximiliano Cuevas, chief executive of Clinica de Salud del Valle de Salinas. “We acknowledge the fact that this is not a cure-all, end-all for the problem our nation is facing, and that is a shortage of doctors.”
Many of the Mexican doctors involved in the program said they see it as a civic duty, a way to serve their fellow countrymen and other immigrants seeking a better life in the U.S. They have found that their patients yearn for someone to talk to in their native Spanish.
The California Legislature approved a pilot program for recruiting doctors from Mexico in 2002, laying out basic requirements the doctors needed to meet and an application process. But the California Medical Assn. and Latino physicians in the U.S. mounted opposition, warning of a two-tiered system of care that would relegate farmworkers to doctors of lesser skills. The program stalled.
Latino physicians accused Cuevas and Arnoldo Torres, then executive director of the California Hispanic Health Care Assn. and an advocate for the program, of creating a “doctor bracero program,” a reference to the 1942 agreement between the U.S. and Mexico to send over laborers to work the fields and railroads during a labor shortage.
“There was quite a bit of opposition to this little idea to provide physicians in these rural communities,” Cuevas recounted. With no headway, they let the program rest for more than a decade.
By 2015, with the need for Spanish-speaking doctors growing ever greater, opposition to the concept had muted. Cuevas and Torres rekindled their efforts, traveling to Mexico to recruit doctors. The Mexican government was willing to oblige — on condition that the doctors they exported serve no more than three years in the U.S. The strict time limit helped allay concerns in Mexico about a permanent “brain drain” of medical talent.
The visiting doctors’ salaries in California range by specialty, but start around $250,000 a year. The expense is covered by the Clinica de Salud health system, which is federally funded to serve low-income and uninsured residents. Cuevas said the Mexican doctors are paid the same salaries as clinic doctors trained in the U.S.
More:
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2023/11/california-imports-doctors-from-mexico-to-fill-gaping-holes-in-farmworker-health-care/
