Clinical Care

[Editor’s Note: This blog post is an installment of our occasional series entitled “In Action,” in which we check in with MCN advisors and board members on their own paths to serve the underserved.]

There’s a lot to learn from this week’s list of health justice news and notes, recommended by MCN staff. Which disease will kill 75 million people by 2050? What do immigrants who die while trying to cross the US/Mexico border leave behind? Read on to find out.

MCN’s Amy Liebman, MPA, MA, Director of Environmental and Occupational Health, attended the 143rd American Public Health Association (APHA) Annual Meeting and Exposition in Chicago. Yesterday, Liebman presented “Policy exclusions and unequal protection for vulnerable workers.

The final days of harvest have arrived for much of the country. The last sugar beets are being pulled out of the ground in North Dakota; apple harvest has a few more weeks in New York State. In California, the opposite is true. Slightly cooler weather in the Central Valley means farms are green with young plants to fill America’s plates through the winter.

By Sharena Hagins, National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership and Alexis Guild, Farmworker Justice 

This week, Homero Segovia, Migrant Clinicians Network’s Health Network Associate, tragically lost his life in a car accident. We at Migrant Clinicians Network struggled to keep working with the weight of this massive loss upon us. The trouble is, the work keeps piling up; all the momentum in the world of health justice hasn’t stopped (which, we know, is a positive thing). Next week, we will offer a blog post to commemorate Homero and his work at MCN.

[Editor’s Note: As part of our ongoing series On the Path to Migrant Health, we present guest blog posts by future migrant clinicians. Today’s guest blogger, Elena Diller, is a junior at Washington and Lee University. She is a Sociology major on the pre-med track, with minors in both Poverty and Human Capability Studies and Women and Gender Studies. She will pursue an MD/ MPH dual degree after graduation. She explores her first encounter with MCN as an intern at New American Pathways, where she assisted refugees.] 

At the 2015 Symposium on Excellence in Primary Care, Tom Bodenheimer, MD, declared that we already know what good primary care looks like. Dr. Bodenheimer then challenged the participants to consider why systems still struggle to provide the best quality primary care.

This week’s post could have been called “A few dozen on Friday” -- there were lots of happenings in the world of health justice for the mobile poor. Here’s a tidy selection of the offered news pieces recommended by MCN staff.

1. Charlotte, Development Manager, noted this Texas Tribune article detailing the opposition in Dallas against legislation for rest breaks for construction workers.

by Ileana Maria Ponce-Gonzalez, MD, MPH, CNC, Senior Advisor for Scientific and Strategic Planning, Migrant Clinicians Network; and Laura Flores Cantrell, JD, Senior Program Officer, Washington Dental Service Foundation