Public Health Agencies Turn to Locals to Extend Reach Into Immigrant Communities
Local health departments combat disparities by funding immigrant and minority community groups and letting them decide how best to spend the money.
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Local health departments combat disparities by funding immigrant and minority community groups and letting them decide how best to spend the money.
The industry has long relied on immigrants to bolster its ranks, and they’ll be critical to meeting future staffing needs, experts say. But as the baby boom generation fills beds, policymakers are slow to open new pathways for foreign workers.
Covid remains a threat for the roughly 30,000 people in the country’s network of immigration facilities. But ICE continues to flout its own pandemic protocols, an extension of the facilities’ poor history of medical care.
Refugees are arriving in the U.S. in greater numbers after a 40-year low, prompting some health professionals to rethink ways to provide culturally competent care amid a shortage of mental health services.
Los Angeles taps Marta Segura, director of the city’s climate emergency mobilization office, as its first heat officer. Segura, the first Hispanic person to hold such a position in the country, will work across city departments on an early warning system while developing cooling strategies.
Hispanic residents have long been among the least likely to have health insurance — in Colorado and across the country — in part because of unauthorized immigrants. The state is expanding coverage to some of them, although the change runs up against lingering fears about the use of public benefits.
Julia Espinosa is a U.S. citizen who needs high-tech care and three transplants. But if the federal government won’t let her father work here, she could lose her insurance.
Thousands of ICE detainees nationwide have tested positive for covid; 11 have died. Medical providers in California are volunteering to educate immigrants awaiting trial or deportation about covid treatment and vaccination.
Stressed vaccine communicators battle anti-vaccine propaganda while seeking to persuade Latino farmworkers to get covid boosters.
Some doctors, sick of mainstream health care’s red tape, are finding refuge in practices that combine concierge medicine with charity care.
A class action lawsuit seeks better care for immigrants with physical disabilities or mental illness who were detained after trying to enter the country. Other disabled immigrants without legal status are also finding it difficult to get care.
Those seeking to replace California Gov. Gavin Newsom in Tuesday’s recall election disagree with him on more than mask and vaccine mandates. The conservative candidates tend to favor free-market solutions over Newsom’s expansion of publicly funded health coverage.
Medical-legal partnerships in Montana, Colorado and elsewhere across the nation operate on the notion that fixing patients’ legal ills is a vital part of their health care.
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In a suburb of Denver, a doctor runs a clinic that finds creative solutions to treat a large refugee and immigrant population, sometimes to the dismay of the medical establishment.
Food insecurity soared during the pandemic, including among unauthorized immigrants, who are not eligible for federally funded food stamps. California’s Democratic lawmakers want to expand the benefit to that population, but opponents cite the massive ongoing cost to the state.
Health care workers find it easy to empathize with Central American children after their painful journeys to the U.S.
A growing number of Mexican and Central American migrants are trying to cross into the U.S. at the southern border. Volunteers at one free clinic in Tijuana tend to the health needs of migrants waiting for their immigration cases to come up — and simply trying to survive in packed and dangerous encampments.
Some immigrant groups are closing the ethnic gap on COVID-19 shots. For many Kurdish Americans, their fears about vaccination are entangled with their experiences in refugee camps after fleeing Iraq.
The percentage of medical students who can’t find residencies is increasing every year. But as more graduates look for support, they might not realize that two organizations offering it are backed by anti-immigrant groups.
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