First Lady Michelle Obama recently launched a nationwide campaign to lower childhood obesity, citing that one-third of U.S. children are overweight. NHMA is proud to be invited to partner with the First Lady and the White House in this effort.

The Let’s Move campaign will combat childhood obesity by focusing on four main strategies: helping parents make health family choices, providing healthier food options in schools, promoting physical activity and ensuring that low-income urban and rural areas have access to healthy and affordable food.

One in four Latino youth is overweight, and the result has been an alarming increase in Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure among children. The causes are numerous and range from a lack of supermarkets in Hispanic neighborhoods to disparities in access to health services. But regardless of the barriers, this growing trend must end.

The mission of Let’s Move is to solve the childhood obesity epidemic within a generation. That’s an ambitious goal, and one that is going to require cooperation between governments, organizations, companies, schools and families at every level. NHMA is committed to doing our part to fight childhood obesity and will be working with the White House and our other partners to educate Latino communities on healthy lifestyles for children – everything from learning how to make smart grocery purchases to finding safe outdoor options for physical activity.

I’d love to hear your ideas for lowering childhood obesity too. What healthy lifestyle measures have worked in your family or community? Let me know!

My organization, the National Hispanic Medical Association, is committed to improving the health of Hispanics and other underserved. We support policies that will reform public health and medical services to decrease health care disparities and improve the health status of vulnerable groups. The National Disparities Report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that our community has the worst access and quality care compared to non-Hispanics in the nation.

Evidence-based public health and medicine strategies are necessary to decrease variation of service delivery that impacts and rations care to Latinos, especially in our poor neighborhoods. Medical treatment should be based on comparative effectiveness value of treatment strategies that produce the greatest benefit for the Hispanic community at the lowest cost. We recognize that comparative effectiveness research is about value in health care. We also heed the concerns of those who have warned to beware of a “one size fits all” approach that could decrease access to treatments for minority patients. However, NHMA believes that comparative effectiveness research will add to the body of knowledge for reducing health disparities for 1) physicians to use to improve quality care for patients; as well as 2) for administrators to use to improve health systems for delivery in following priority areas:

1. Cultural competence and health literacy research in order to ultimately change behaviors and improve lifestyle in our communities
2. Effective ways of communicating with Hispanic patients and their families
3. Knowledge about health disparities interventions between hospital systems and clinics that have longstanding experience with Hispanic physicians and their patients
4. Innovative research targeted to Hispanic patients and their families
5. Integrated case that is outcomes based – and with mental health and oral health as well as physical health

I wanted to let you all know about an excellent opportunity that has been presented to the National Hispanic Medical Association. NHMA has been invited to participate in the development of health care reform legislation for Senators Kennedy and Baucus, Congressmen Waxman, Rangel, and Miller and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Their respective staff will be introducing and distributing their bills starting in June for public comment. We have been asked to submit our recommendations on reforming the system for inclusion into these bills by June 1st; this gives us a narrow window of three weeks or less to prepare a document for submission to congressional staff.

The magnitude of the debate is broad; Congress is asking us for specific strategies that respond to four topics: 1) the expansion of affordable insurance coverage that impacts favorably on Latinos; 2) the expansion of primary care services, integration of preventive medicine and recommended incentives to be responsive to the Latino patient; 3) how do we improve quality via the creation of culturally competent, CLAS, and Patient-Centered Medical Home primary care services; 4) how de we reform medical education to ensure the appropriate future workforce for achieving health care reform?

I invite you and your colleagues to join the NHMA Hispanic Provider Community Forum on Health Care Reform on our portal: www.hispanichealth.info to share your insights and recommendations for health care reform today.

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Given the historic opportunity to lead the nation as it transforms to a nation that is about to become a majority of current minority populations, President Elect Obama and his Transition Team, announced this week, should consider identifying a diverse leadership among the political appointees in the health related positions–not just HHS, VA, DOD, but at the White House-–to develop a realistic transformation in the health care reform policy making process. There is a critical need to consider health care reform that allows the health system to become more responsive to the new America with cultural competence and literacy as well as including issues based on the social determinants of health. The President-Elect plan for access to care and quality health care that addresses health disparities is a vision needed sooner than later in order to prepare for the changing population. And of course, the health of minority women and their families needs to become a priority item as the policy making starts after January with the attention to helping them through SCHIP, Medicaid and Medicare.

As a leader from the Hispanic community with supportive parents and counselors and with a stellar academic background, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in the Federal Health Careers Opportunity Program (PHS Title VII) – not only to be a program coordinator for a local CBO (East LA Health Task Force, 1980), but as a pre-med student from Stanford University who had not completed the pre-med curriculum upon graduation, I was appointed to an HCOP post-bac program (Creighton University, 1981) and was accepted into UCLA Medical School in 1982 where I served as a counselor for minority premed students for the State of California HCOP program. I know several Latino physicians and public health professionals who benefited from this program and wouldn’t be where they are if it hadn’t been for this program. HCOP has been the major recruitment program for disadvantaged students to enter medicine and public health careers – until the Federal government decided to decimate it in 2006. Now with the current physician and public health workforce shortage along with the tremendous growth in the diversity of the U.S. population, this program should be brought back to its 2005 funding level. In addition, I believe there should be a regional approach to workforce planning and implementation, so that programs in regions with large Hispanic populations target their efforts to bring Hispanic students into the region’s medical and public health schools. The next President needs to understand the importance of having a diverse health care workforce – the literature has shown that Hispanic and African American physicians and dentists generally care for more minority, Medicaid and uninsured patients – the most vulnerable patients in our society, and those who, without health care, tend to be the sickest with the greatest health care costs to the nation.