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Community organizations prepare health plan for Colorado Hispanics(EFE Ingles Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) By Francisco Miraval. Denver, Sep 29 (EFE).- The rapid increase in Colorado's Hispanic population has not been accompanied by similar growth in the number of Latino health professionals, and so the University of Colorado Denver has initiated a 30-year project to alleviate the situation. The project groups 18 community organizations in the metropolitan area which will focus their work on the neighborhoods with a high concentration of Hispanics and other minorities. "I think it's time for Hispanics to see the university as their house. But for that (to happen), we need to have more professors of color and to overcome other obstacles. One of those is that Hispanic children and young people see that they can make a difference for their community," Zen Camacho, UCD's vice provost and associate vice chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion, told Efe. Part of his mission is to attract new Hispanics to the university, but Camacho, who has a doctorate in chemistry, wants to do that "in the context of classes that capture the cultural richness of our community." For that, he said, "you've got to start from the first grade teaching our kids that one day they will be the doctors and the health professionals for the Hispanic community." Now, according to information from the Kaiser Family Foundation, of the almost 7,000 doctors who practice in Colorado, just 188 are Hispanics, less than 2 percent of the total, in a state where Latinos make up more than 20 percent of the population. According to the same source, of the 135 new medical school graduates in Colorado in 2007, only 10 were Hispanic. Camacho, who has devoted himself to community health projects for 35 years, said that the demographic gap between the Hispanic population and the number of Latino health professionals will keep growing unless that minority community becomes aware of its worrying health situation and, on that basis, fosters among Hispanic youth a desire to study medicine. To help push that awareness, he collaborated in organizing the neighborhood health meeting held last weekend in northeastern Denver, a meeting attended by more than 1,000 area residents. To push for the second goal, Camacho will soon start making presentations in public schools in Denver and in neighboring Aurora where there is a Hispanic student majority, especially in fifth grade classes and in vocational orientation sessions in high school. "The idea is for the schools and the community to work together with the medical school of the University of Colorado Denver to start right now to solve the problem which otherwise will be much more complicated in 2040," he said. Meanwhile, young people like Mariana Ledesma are already working in community health programs and preparing themselves in college to become health professionals. "Somebody has to treat ... Hispanic patients in our hospitals. To do that, we have to train outselves not only in the medical area but also from the point of view of the culture of our community," she said. Camacho said that Ledesma and other Latino university medical students are the example that the younger Hispanic students should follow. "Our challenge is to train Hispanic students from the first grade so that within 20 years they become doctors and nurses for Hispanics," he said. EFE fm/bp Copyright ? 2008 EFE News Services (U.S.) Inc. |