October 04, 2017 | By Ramon Jimenez, MD, and Erick Santos, MD, PhD
Latino/Latina Physicians Must Take a Leadership Role for True Health Equity
Latino/Latina physicians need to participate as partners in the fight to decrease disparities in healthcare delivery.
As Latino/Latina physicians, we are challenged daily to enable our patients to receive optimum healthcare. The Latino/Latina patient population faces many unique obstacles to achieving this goal. These include language barriers, cultural understanding, socio-economic factors, and comorbidities of obesity and diabetes. These factors can lead to poor health outcomes.
Statistics tell us that there is a worsening shortage of doctors that are racially and ethnically concordant (who have language skills and cultural familiarity needed to serve Latino/Latina patients). Thus we need a call to action at the national and state levels to increase the ranks of Latino/Latina physicians. In addition, those of us physicians (Latino/Latina and otherwise) who serve the Latino/Latina population in all regions of this country must educate our patients and the public to raise awareness of these important issues that affect the Latino/Latina community.
Increasing the number of Latino/Latina physicians may help reverse disparities in healthcare delivery to some degree; however, all physicians must be made more aware of the unique cultural and epidemiological requirements of the Latino/Latina community to leverage that perspective.
There has been a growing numbers of Latinos/Latinas in the population, but no corresponding increase in Latino/Latina physicians to help serve the population. The call to action is to have Latino/Latina physicians take a leadership role in terms of increasing our numbers and lead the charge in understanding the challenges our Latino/Latina population face. The Latino/Latina population is exploding and no longer residing just in the Southwest. They are found in all regions of the United States. Non-Latino/Latina physicians increasingly encounter these patients in their practice. They must be educated in cultural competency/sensitivity so that they can provide HEALTH EQUITY.
CATEGORIES: Health Equity