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news:
Project to help
Latino representation in health care administration
By Priscilla Gutierrez
Summer Forty-Niner
Preparing Latino
students for a career in health care administration, a field
that lacks Latino representation, has been a goal of the Latino
Healthcare Professionals Project at Cal State Long Beach.
Two sisters from
St. Joseph's Health Care Foundation began LHPP because they
found that there were no Latinos in health care administration
making decisions about treating the Latino community, said
Britt Rios-Ellis, associate professor of health sciences and
director of the of LHPP.
Twenty Latino students
are chosen each year to participate in the project, according
to Dr. Harold Hunter, chair of the healthcare administration
department. Fifteen of the students receive two-year
tuition scholarships at CSULB, and all participants receive
a one-time stipend for a summer internship at a health care
organization.
"Even though
Latinos are beginning to be a majority in the population,"
Hunter said, "they are very highly underrepresented in
management, particularly in health care management."
Latinos are a substantial
minority group that needs representation in the health care
field linguistically and culturally, according to Hunter.
To be eligible
for the LHPP, students must be first-generation, bilingual
and bicultural CSULB students at a junior level. They should
have a good academic standing and an interest in health care
administration.
The recipients
either major in health care administration or enroll in a
two-year certificate program in health care administration.
The program involves
a great deal of mentoring and bonding that allows the participants
to feel good about their college experience and realize that
somebody really does cares about their future, Hunter said.
"I benefited
from the support that I received from the faculty," said
Maria Montoya, CSULB graduate from the LHPP. "And
also from the networking, meeting other Latino professionals
working in the field who are examples to minority students."
The sisters of
St. Joseph provided the majority of the funding in the past,
and Kaiser Permanente, the Orange County Health Care Foundation,
Baxter Health Care and the Long Beach Memorial Hospital are
now funding the LHPP.
The LHPP wants
to get 75 percent of their students working in health care
and 50 percent of their students in a graduate program, a
goal that has been successful, according to Rios-Ellis.
"What we are
trying to do is increase the awareness of the needs of this
[Latino] population," Hunter said. "I feel that
it is an investment in the long run."
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