Recently Introduced Programs, Facilities Target Latinos, Vietnamese
U.S. Census figures out this month show that Latinos and Asians are the fastest-growing ethnic communities in Orange County. Some local hospitals, having already seen the demographic shifts develop in their areas, have introduced programs and services to compete for their business.
For instance, Tenet Healthcare Corp. is adding various culturally tailored programs at its hospitals, said Gus Valdespino, a Tenet regional vice president of operations who works in the company’s regional office in Irvine. Tenet has 10 OC facilities.
La Dulce Espera, which operates from Tenet’s Western Medical Center-Anaheim hospital, was a specific example cited by Valdespino.
“It’s a comprehensive prenatal program. It covers the whole journey of motherhood,” he said.
Free pregnancy testing, obstetrician referral, pre-conception counseling, infant CPR instruction, breast feeding counseling and support, and prenatal and nutritional education are part of the program, which also is available in English as Growing Expectations.
Tenet’s other initiative components include translators for patients and their families, making sure individual hospitals have diverse governing boards, and disease-specific programs such as diabetes education, Valdespino said. Meanwhile, employees at Tenet hospitals that serve large populations of color receive cultural sensitivity training.
Tenet’s ethnic programs have been about three or four years in development, “after we’ve seen the changing cultural dynamics in Los Angeles and Orange County,” Valdespino said. He estimates that 15% to 20% of the healthcare provided at Tenet’s Southern California hospitals goes to Latinos.
Tenet, however, has not marketed its programs in a traditional way. Valdespino said that it uses medical staff members, community organizations and business interactions to get the word out about its initiatives, and that the company needs to make sure that each hospital has to be prepared internally.
“Then we can market them,” Valdespino said.
Tenet also addresses patients’ health insurance needs in some areas. Last summer, it joined with Woodland Hills-based Health Net and others to create Salud con Health Net, a package of products targeted toward Latinos and their families in California and Mexico. Salud con Health Net hasn’t yet made it to Orange County, Valdespino said.
At the hospital level, Tenet makes counselors available to help patients determine their eligibility for MediCal and Healthy Families. Healthy Families provides health coverage for children whose parents are considered working poor, meaning that they don’t qualify for MediCal but cannot obtain private health insurance.
Latinos and Vietnamese have a higher likelihood of not having health insurance.
The Orange County Health Needs Assessment’s fall 2000 report showed that 68.2% of its Hispanic respondents reported having some sort of health coverage, while 76.9 percent of Vietnamese respondents reported having some health coverage. It showed that 82.5% of other Asian Pacific Islanders, 82.6% of “other races” and 90.5% of whites reported having some type of healthcare coverage.
Orange-based UCI Medical Center is also exploring cross-cultural medicine, with efforts such as two community-based satellite clinics. UCI’s Westminster location serves a predominantly Vietnamese population, while its Santa Ana clinic serves mainly Latino patients.
Eighty to 85% of UCI’s Westminster clinic clientele are Vietnamese, while 95% of its staff and physicians are, said Sue Alfonso, the clinic’s administrator.
“Not only do we have internal medicine, we have specialists and subspecialists,” Alfonso said. Clinic physicians include specialists in OB/GYN, ear-nose-throat medicine, pain management, cardiology and pediatric surgery.
The discovery that her clinic was picking up most of its patients from within a five-mile radius led to adding Vietnamese services, Alfonso said.
“The community clinic would rather stay in the community,” she said, adding that UCI was able to realize financial benefits by adding more services.
“They are either paying cash or they just don’t have insurance at all,” Alfonso said.
UCI Medical Center is considered a “safety net” hospital, meaning it cares for a large amount of people who receive healthcare coverage from public payers such as MediCal, Healthy Families and Medicare.
Alfonso also noted that Vietnamese students who attended medical school at the University of California, Irvine’s College of Medicine come back to practice at the medical center.
Children’s Hospital of Orange County also offers services in ethnic enclaves. In the fall, CHOC opened a freestanding, full-service pediatric clinic at the Boys & Girls Club of Santa Ana.
CHOC’s clinic offers physical examinations, preventive healthcare, immunizations and vision and hearing screenings. Officials said that they opened the facility because there was a need to provide pediatric care for children who have neither private insurance nor support from government health programs. They noted that statistics showed that the median family income in two census tracts near the West Highland Street club was $12,000.
In Fountain Valley, Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center used a planning process to add services tailored to Vietnamese patients, said Marcia Manker, the facility’s chief operating officer. “When we looked at our demographics, our strategic plan, we found that Vietnamese made up 18% of our (surrounding area) population.
“Our mission is to provide care to our community, ” Manker said. She estimates that Orange Coast Memorial’s Vietnamese patient census is now around 15%.
Orange Coast Memorial developed its programs by collaborating with Vietnamese physicians, Manker said. Such programs include hiring a bilingual patient and family liaison and offering health lectures at a learning center in Garden Grove.
“(We covered) heart and gastrointestinal issues, some demographic-specific indicators,” Manker recalled.
Marketing efforts include advertising in Vietnamese-language newspapers and participating in community health fairs, Manker said. In addition, Orange Coast Memorial hosted an open house that was attended by more than 100 Vietnamese-American physicians. n
