My Community's Impact on My Medical Career: Demographics, Values, and Ethics

I was born and lived in Lubbock, Texas, until I went to college at age eighteen. Lubbock has a lower median income when compared to most cities in Texas. Since some people do not have health insurance and cannot afford to pay for health care costs without it, they do not receive appropriate care. As a result, the uninsured and underinsured are less likely to seek preventive care or necessary medical care. While volunteering at Covenant Children's Hospital during the summer of 2010, I witnessed impoverished individuals trying to deal with their health care issues, and it reinforced my desire to help disadvantaged persons.

The demographics in Lubbock undoubtedly contribute to the city being an underserved medical area. In fact, more than thirty-two percent of Lubbock's population is Hispanic. For some, their first language is Spanish and they do not understand English well or at all. Many individuals in this subset of the Lubbock population are low-income and, as a result, have many barriers impeding their access to health care.

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These individuals, such as my own father, also experience discrimination because of their ethnicity, and this fact has also contributed to my wanting to help minority populations.

To use a personal example, my father was born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and moved to South Texas when he was six years old. People are always surprised that, although my father is fluent in Spanish, my brothers and I did not learn Spanish from him. Instead, we took Spanish in school. My father always provided us with homework help, but his childhood experience of prejudice hindered him from sharing his heritage with us.

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He believed that by raising us to fit in with our white peers, we would avoid the prejudice he had suffered. Through his experience, I have learned that people are not always accepting of differences, but that it is more important to embrace than to deny who I am.

I have worked hard to immerse myself in the Spanish culture, both because I want to learn more about my heritage and because I want to be able to communicate with my patients so that I can provide them with the best care. Thus, I took three years of Advanced Placement Spanish classes in high school and received a citation in Spanish at Harvard. After my freshman year of college, I volunteered in Ecuador for three months, where I continued to practice my Spanish. I am also committed to helping minority students through academic support. I work with the LACASA Afterschool Program to help minority students enhance their lives through academic and enrichment activities. Living in Lubbock has helped inspire me to work with underprivileged populations both now and during my medical career.

I have been confronted with many ethical dilemmas while working at the LACASA Afterschool Program, which is located at Public School 84 in the Upper West Side neighborhood of Manhattan. I was the science and technology teacher at LACASA last year, and because of my dedication to my students' success, I was hired as the program coordinator. LACASA is representative of the Upper West Side community and serves a broad spectrum of families. Some students live in the most expensive housing in Manhattan on Central Park West; others live in the housing projects. This diversity is a positive aspect of our program, because it introduces our students to people from various backgrounds, but it also complicates the decisions our afterschool program is forced to make.

As program coordinator of LACASA, I am confronted by moral decisions every day. All families can choose among three different payment options: ten dollars a week, twenty dollars a week, and sixty dollars a week. We ask parents to choose a payment plan that they can afford, but we provide the same programming for all students. Still, families who struggle financially sometimes cannot even afford our cheapest rate. They will enroll their children in the program, but then quickly fall behind in payments. However, without payments, we cannot continue to run our program and, if our program closed, the educational potential of many students would be negatively affected.

I am therefore faced with the tough decision of dismissing children from LACASA. I have to decide if refusing a student for his parents' inability to pay is consistent with our program philosophy. Suspending students whose parents cannot pay usually means reducing the diversity of our program and only catering to wealthy families, so I make exceptions. For example, William is one of the kindest students at P.S. 84, but his father is a crack cocaine user. He is negligent about picking up his son at six o'clock in the evening, and he owes LACASA thousands of dollars for past services. Despite this fact, William is still a student of the LACASA Afterschool Program.

We allow William to continue to attend the program, because it is evident that our services are having a positive impact on his life and that our counselors are serving as role models for William. Still, there are times when we must remove students. Angel has attention deficit disorder and is frequently sent down to the office because he is disrupting class. Since I have not been trained to handle his explosive outbursts, we had to remove him from program. Even though the decision to expel a student is difficult, I am comforted by the fact that I never remove a student from the program without first considering options that would allow the child to stay.

My experience at LACASA has taught me that not everyone can be helped, but the instances with difficult circumstances that can be overcome reassure me that my work is beneficial to the community. As a medical doctor, this fact also holds true. All patients cannot be cured of their illnesses, but those who are successfully treated or alleviated of suffering provide doctors with the encouragement to continue working hard and making improvements in their field.

Updated: May 03, 2023
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My Community's Impact on My Medical Career: Demographics, Values, and Ethics. (2023, Jan 17). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-impact-of-my-community-its-demographics-core-values-and-ethical-dilemmas-on-my-career-in-medicine-essay

My Community's Impact on My Medical Career: Demographics, Values, and Ethics essay
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