4/6 long post

Acting on a Grander Scale: Ending Health Care Disparities in the Latino Community

Carol Mendez

Mendez grew up in poverty in Colombia and later emigrated to the United States. Her young cousin’s health issues required Mendez to act as a translator between the physicians and her family members. During her high school years she worked at a center that helped immigrant families. She worked as a volunteer lobbying for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM act) which would benefit high school students like herself by allowing them to obtain permanent citizenship and attend college. With help from her guidance counselor and funding from a scholarship, Mendez was able to attend college. Although, it is not clear how she managed to do that without it being discovered that she was an undocumented immigrant. She continued to work as a translator in health care during college.

I can see how passionate Mendez is about these issues because they directly affect her, but I still can’t completely agree that undocumented immigrants deserve universal health care like she is claiming. I think one major step (and I don’t know how feasible this would be) that could help this issue would be for the government to make it easier/more realistic for immigrants to gain legal entry into the country and have permanent residence. I think everyone has the right to move wherever they wish in order to make the best life for themselves, but are illegal immigrants really making a good life for themselves in the United States if they are still living in poverty?

This essay reminded me of a documentary I saw on ABC news I believe where Diane Sawyer went to rural Appalachia (where I also went on three missionary trips during high school). The people there are very poor because there are hardly any jobs available now that most coal mines have shut down and the area is so remote that they have little access to most amenities. One of the issues the documentary focused on was the poor health of most people there. They drink soda more often than water because it is cheaper and probably safer to drink (because the water is not available by public water supply in many areas.) Of course soda is very unhealthy for people in large quantities like that. Another problem with health care there is that there are very few doctors and most people don’t have health insurance.

Finding the Face in Public Health Policy: Leadership Learning through Outreach.

Courtney S. Turner.

Turner began working in public health care activism during her undergraduate years. She was very passionate about HIV activism and “needle exchange” programs. It promotes the use of sterile needles and injection equipment to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis. It also distributes condoms and sexual health outreach programs. While working with the Baltimore City Department of Health she worked on implementing a DOT program for HIV treatment. Turner mentions while describing a woman with HIV that in the early days of AIDS awareness, the CDC did not believe that women were susceptible to HIV, only gay men. This really surprised me because I never heard this before and I wonder why they didn’t take the time to figure out whether women could contract HIV. It seems obvious now that both women and men can contract HIV.

Choosing Nursing: A Feminist Odyssey

Jan Oosting Kaminsky

I really enjoyed reading Kaminsky’s essay about nursing. I was most interested in her discussion of the shortage of nurses which I agree is a very serious problem. It means that patients will have a lower quality of care when nurses are stretched too thin. I plan on becoming a physicians assistant and I know that there is a shortage of P.A.s as well, mostly because it is a newer profession and the demand has grown faster than the supply of workers. It would be great if nurses could be paid higher wages because then their jobs would not seem as unappealing and more people would become nurses. I actually have quite a few relatives who are nurses and a cousin who is in nursing school. They all work in different areas and have different perspectives of nursing but they all seem to enjoy it. However, I can still see the stigma that exists that makes it seem like it isn’t an esteemed job to have. All of the people I know in nursing are women not surprisingly. I think nursing is one of those careers that most young men don’t even consider because it is a “woman’s job.”

One of the issues of the hierarchy of health care is that it ranks people based on years of education and their salary. However, the people who spend the most time with patients are usually nurses, who fall in the middle of the hierarchy. I don’t know if this will ever change or how it could change, but I think that many nurses today are more confident and autonomous that nurses were 50 years ago. That is one important step in the right direction in improving the nursing field.