Part 2: Interview with Dr. Elena Rios, President, National Hispanic Medical Association and the National Hispanic Health Foundation( continued)
Well, I think we’ ve helped educate through our campaigns on social media and by using doctors that are trained to be on Spanish language TV in different markets around the country. In our campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic, we had more outreach about the importance of getting vaccinated. And we still continue campaigns about vaccines. That’ s something that we’ ve done for both native born and immigrant people. We tell them to go to the federally qualified community health centers that were established to take care of people whether they had insurance or not, and whether they are citizens or not.
What types of advocacy does NHMA do? Does the professional Hispanic medical community that NMHA represents offer to assist in the longtime eradication of health disparities? We mainly focus on the advocacy of federal policies with Congress and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, with the White House, and the US Department of Health and Human Services. NMHA writes letters of support for legislation with other coalitions, and with other medical associations. An example most recently was about smoking and menthol cigarettes. We’ re supporting the ban on them from the FDA and they’ re looking at the regulation now. Another example is the support for looking at decreasing the cost of medications through the insulin cap that happened this last year with the Inflation Reduction Act. We supported that because so many of our communities have diabetes.
We just had a congressional briefing this week with Congressman Raul Ruiz on obesity and cancer, and the importance of educating not only congressional staff who are young and healthy about the importance of having policies for obese more policies, but also to secure more support for decreasing obesity in our communities, and decreasing cancer. One of our sponsors was the American Cancer Society, and they spoke about what they do. We also had the representative from the White House on the Cancer Moonshot, the initiative launched in 2016 to accelerate scientific discovery in cancer research, foster greater collaboration, and improve the sharing of cancer data.
So by educating people about strategies that could be put into policies to help improve the education of our communities, or by having more funding to programs in the medical schools, for example, for the recruitment of more Latinos into medicine, these are ways that we advocate that would eventually improve the health of Hispanics and we can have more doctors that look like us, then we could have more patients with better access to quality care.
Since Congressman Ruiz is an MD, is he a pathway to being able to talk on a more personal basis with people at that level? Yes. He was an undergrad student at UCLA when I was in medical school. He’ s personally part of NHMA, and he talked about some bills that he’ s introducing, for example, breast cancer screening. He has more understanding as an emergency medicine doctor who comes from a family of parents who were farmworkers in the Imperial Valley before he went to Congress. He was an academic doctor at University of California, Riverside. He has more of a personal interest because of his life experience.
We do have international medical school graduates who also are Spanish speaking and culturally aware from their own countries. And I think it’ s important to realize how beneficial they are to our communities because we have so few Hispanic doctors for the growing population. Right now, we’ re one out of five, almost 20 % of the population. We’ re soon going to be one out of four Americans. In California we’ re 40 % of the population, but only 6 % of doctors are Hispanic.
It sounds like from an advocacy standpoint, with Latino MDs and other health professionals, the more that they have a personal connection with some of the issues, the more they can encourage students to do the things necessary to get through medical school. NHMA has done advocacy and leadership development of doctors to understand the importance of educating policymakers and their staff at different levels of the state. At the NHHF, our leadership fellowship is focused on what you’ re talking about. We have 10 doctors a year in California that are brought together in the summer, in August this year, last year it was in September. We take them to Sacramento, to the capital, to meet with policymakers in the governor’ s office and some of the leaders at the Public Health Department. They build their network and learn how to be more of a champion. You can’ t be a champion, advocate change, and be an influencer without having relationships with the policymakers.
I work with champions from other national advocacy organizations here in Washington, DC, depending on
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 11