Teen Healthcare Intern: A Personal Statement

Background statement: Heritage Valley Medical Center has had a wonderful reputation for providing excellent health care services to their community. Initially, their community was 80% Caucasian, 40% African American, and 5% Hispanic. However, in the last 5 years, the population has changed to more minorities and the whites have moved out to the suburbs. This caused the Center’s occupancy rate to go down 40% because many of their traditional, more affluent, private-pay patients had left the neighborhood. To bring in revenue, they campaigned to bring in more Medicaid patients.

My goal is to become a primary doctor working with underserved communities, especially the Latino community. My work and volunteer experience and my professional goal are committed to provide service to the community with cultural competence, diversity and service orientation. CMSRU humanistic education in the art and science of medicine will complement these life experiences, characteristics, as well as my professional and personal interests and goals. As a medical student at CMSRU I will be able to receive an excellent education in patient care, will feel included in the CMSRU community, will share and strengthen my professionalism, collaborative and and civic responsibility skills. The mission and core values of CMSRU match my interests,

For the purposes of this project we will focus on Latinos. In the United States, Latinos are one of the fastest growing minority groups. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2001) has predicted that by the year 2050 Latinos will account for 25% of the total population. While Latinos as a whole have typically been underrepresented on college campuses, the number of Latinos in universities has recently grown and is expected to continue to increase (Gonzalez,

As a low-income, first-generation Mexican American/college graduate, my personal identities and experiences uniquely position me to contribute to RFU’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts (DEI). Through my journey, I have encountered various challenges and triumphs that have shaped my perspective and deepened my commitment to promoting DEI in healthcare and beyond. My lived experience growing up in an economically disadvantaged and medically underserved community has heightened my awareness of the healthcare disparities and inequities that exist, especially being raised in a traditional Hispanic household. It has fueled my passion to address these issues and advocate for accessible, culturally sensitive, and equitable healthcare.

In addition, I recently graduated from Lakewood High School, a school where most of the student body is white. There is a very small group of students that are usually left behind, the English as a Second Language. That 's why I decided to create a club that gives the ESL community a safe place to ensure their academic success. I also have a personal connection to women who suffer because of economic hardships. I decided to join the Girls Leadership Council, hosted by the Colorado Women 's Foundation.

Internship Most physician assistant programs require anywhere between 500-1,000 hours of shadowing a physician assistant and direct patient contact. Direct patient contact can be considered to be working or volunteering as an EMT, Medical Assistant, Medical Scribe, Nurse, Nursing Assistant, etc. In order to fulfill these requirements, I will be taking a Nursing Assistant course over this summer to receive my certification to begin working towards the hours I will need to apply to a program. Once I am a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA), I plan on shadowing physician assistants over the summer from different specialties.

Their sacrifices to leave their home country and arrive in the United States to give me a better life was a big dedication and I want to support them as much as I can. Inspiring and helping others is one of the many attributes I have learned about myself after I graduated high school. As a first-generation Asian-American college student, I understand the weight of responsibility that I have to endure with. I hope to break barriers and challenge stereotypes, demonstrating that one's background should not limit their potential. I aim to encourage aspiring healthcare professionals from diverse backgrounds to pursue their dreams

Healthcare providers must understand how health traditions and views impact health outcomes in African American communities. Each culture has different preferences for how they navigate healthcare systems, so it is imperative health providers are culturally competent in care for all cultures. Health literacy is a major factor in the African American community, which stems from multiple barriers to healthcare. Low health literacy in Black communities is rooted in historical power structures where discriminatory policies were present systems (Muvuka et al., 2020). When there are discriminatory policies and practices are in place, it hinders individuals from accessing skills and resources to understand health outcomes.

Healthcare disparity can be explained as the gap created in the delivery of healthcare to communities which causes some communities to receive better healthcare than others. Some factors that can cause these disparities include race, socioeconomic status, location, and gender. Because of health care disparities, there are a lot of patients who are and will be at risk for many diseases such as diabetes, obesity and hypertension. These disparities negatively affect the overall cost of delivering quality healthcare and are issues that must be addressed by the people who know them best, the health care workers. Through the NURSE Corps Program I hope to help address these imbalances in underserved communities in various ways.

The language barrier in healthcare creates a huge gap in communication, especially where there is a huge number of people from the Hispanic community coming in for health services. In order to learn more about this issue, on October 13, 2017, I interviewed Mary Kay Rosolie in La Red Health Center on her profession and what she goes through with the majority of her patients being Latinos. Not having the ability to speak Spanish builds a huge barrier in communication. Although Mrs. Rosolie has worked in the medical field for many years, she stated that it is extremely difficult to interact with a Spanish speaking family when they know little to no English. It used to be that when there was no available staff to translate they would have to call

These factors increase the minority groups of being uninsured, lack of health care accessibility, receive poorer quality care and experiencing worse health outcomes, including low income individuals and black people (Ubri & Artiga, 2016). In United States, the healthcare disparities are very obvious and it can be clearly seen between urban and rural

I know VCOM is dedicated to creating an engaging learning environment to educate the next generation of doctors to provide care of the utmost quality. As someone who grew up in a medically-underserved county and desires to address the needs of my community, I can relate to the mission of VCOM to address the needs of medically-underserved populations When I shadowed Dr. Edwin Chan, we discussed potential research projects I could propose to the professors from the UF Department of Anthropology. We agreed I should propose research on the disparate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of color in Alachua County. While the project unfortunately fell through when returning to UF, addressing these disparities remained a forefront concern which I seek to pursue in the future. I anticipate that VCOM, with a commitment to health equity and addressing the needs of underserved communities, will provide me the opportunity to pursue research assessing disparities in healthcare.

Second, Elizabeth is a first generation Mexican-American, give a birth to a first child in high school, may have inability to complete a proper education might have language barrier. The inability to speak English and unable to communicate effectively, and feeling embarrassed sometimes prevent her from communicating with her physician. HCP must give information and services in patients ' preferred language, including patient access to professional interpreters who have health-related dialect skills and familiar with patient’s cultural competence. The family unit and religion is culturally the most important to the Hispanic community.

Through my stroke outreach experience, I saw how culturally competent care can address health disparities. At each site I visited, I engaged with community leaders to better understand the community’s needs. I hope to expand upon these experiences at ZSOM through the Free Clinic located in Queens, as it will allow me to utilize my familiarity with Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese to serve the growing Hispanic and Asian communities nearby. Through opportunities like these, I aim to understand how to communicate effectively with a variety of patients and deliver appropriate care. Integrating community health experience into my medical education will bring me one step closer to my goal of becoming a physician that caters to the unique needs of each patient.

The main focus of many immigrant debate is whether or not unauthorized immigrants should be included in any of the health care bill or whether or not immigrants are taking over jobs that Americans do not want to do. What is always forgotten is the fact that immigrants are a critical part of the health care workforce at both high and less skilled ends of the occupational spectrum. Evidently, immigrants encompass more than “one one-quarter of all Physicians and Surgeons in the United States, and roughly one-fifth of all Nursing, Psychiatric, and Home Health Aides”. “Immigrant health care workers are employed in occupations that are not only expected to experience relatively high labor demand over the coming decade, but in which there are already pronounced worker shortages in many parts of the country”. Even if more native-born workers are drawn into health care professions in the future, the role that immigrants play in providing health care services is likely to increase as the U.S. population continues to age and the growing population of senior citizens requires more medical care.