COUNTYWIDE : Lack of Latino Doctors Addressed

In an effort to increase the number of Latino physicians to serve the county’s 560,000 Latino residents, Cypress College will begin a program for foreign-trained doctors.

Organizers said Cypress will be the first community college in the nation to offer a medical review course to help graduates of foreign medical schools, especially from Mexico and South America, prepare to practice in the United States.

“Times have changed over the last 20 to 30 years. . . . There certainly is a very worthwhile need for bilingual Latino doctors,” said Thomas Reeve, Cypress College dean of social sciences. “We believe this represents one of the fastest and most economical ways of providing more doctors.”

About 20 professors from five university medical schools will instruct the 14-week course, which begins Monday.

“This program will help answer the tremendous need of Hispanic physicians here and in Southern California. It will have a major impact on health care in Hispanic communities,” said Hector Leano, an engineer from Anaheim and a coordinator of the program.

The course is intended to help prepare the physicians to take the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam Part 1, the first of several rungs for practicing medicine in the state. The foreign doctors will be able to take postgraduate training, such as hospital internships, after passing Part 1.

Members of the Anaheim-based Consortium of Physicians from Latin America sought and received help from professors at the medical schools at universities in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missouri, New York and Guadalajara.

To help pay for classroom space and expenses for instructors, the consortium has set a $600 course fee, said Rolando Castillo, an assistant professor at UC Irvine medical school, who helped establish the consortium last year.

Castillo and other organizers said the fee amount and cooperation from Cypress College represented a significant breakthrough for consortium members, who, despite their medical degrees, are Spanish-speaking immigrants in need of help as they make a difficult cultural transition to Southern California.

Similar review courses are provided by private institutes and some universities but can cost from $3,500 to $5,000, Castillo said.

“The cost makes it exorbitant for our members to enroll. Most of the doctors are from Mexico and South American countries and they come from areas of lower socioeconomic advantages,” Castillo said.

Leano said California was the obvious choice for such a program given the state’s growing Latino population, and the fact that there “already was a pool of foreign doctors” here needing to pass the exam.