La Clinica Del Pueblo
2831 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009-4607
http://www.lcdp.org

There will not be a separate health fair outreach ISCOPES team partnering with La Clinica del Pueblo for the 2010-2011 school year. Instead, there will be one ISCOPES team focusing on immigrant patient rights. Please see the anticipated project description here: http://www.gwumc.edu/iscopes/sites/LaClinicaPueblo.html

Past Projects
The 2008-09 La Clinica del Pueblo ISCOPES team successfully completed a variety of projects. The team assisted with La Clinica health fairs. These health fairs focused on educating community members about chronic diseases and common health concerns for Latinos, as well as providing information about a specific patient’s risks. These topics included: body mass index, cholesterol, HIV, hypertension, and diabetes.  The health fairs offered an opportunity for ISCOPES volunteers to become involved directly with the community, to learn how community health educators interact with the community, and to see how the materials they developed are being used. In addition, the team collected donations of glucose and cholesterol strips to be used at community health fairs. The team also created a health clinic referral guide. This document provides a list of the majority of health clinics in the DC area, the services they offer, the method of payment, the insurance required, and the nearest bus lines, to assist the health fair workers in properly directing members of the community to a clinic best suited to care for them.

The 2008-09 team hosted a couple of brown bag lunches on patient rights and responsibilities in regard to language access. This event was an opportunity to inform current and future clinicians about limited-English proficient (LEP) and non-English proficient (NEP) patients who may come into the clinic. The team explained the patients’ rights and responsibilities, as well as educated on the legalities of the process. This presentation helped clinicians and students understand the language barriers and what their role as a clinician is to make sure all patients have the same opportunities for treatment and equal health care.

The 2007-08 ISCOPES La Clinica team has developed "I Speak" cards in a number of languages, developed a website for both providers and patients, given information sessions to providers and brown bag sessions for GW health professions students, spoken with patients in clinics, health fairs, and on street corners.  We've created a PSA (Public Service Announcement in the form of a TV Commercial) and presented at regional and national conferences.

Site Description
La Clinica del Pueblo is a community health clinic in Ward 1 in Washington, DC, which began in 1983 as a Coalition of Central and North Americans seeking to improve the quality of health care among Latino residents. It started as a one room free clinic for the Latino population and now has developed into a multi-story, comprehensive health center that continues to offer services to uninsured children and adults.

The current facility, located in Mount Pleasant, Washington DC, provides comprehensive primary care; adult and pediatric, vaccination programs, women's health services, a diabetes clinic, comprehensive AIDS programs from prevention to treatment to case management, nutrition counseling, a 24 hour medical call and full service laboratory, community- based outreach, counseling, mental health services, complementary medical services, and patient advocacy. There are presently over 30 staff members and 100 volunteers, which consist of doctors, physician assistants, medical residents, chiropractors, nurse practitioners, nurses, psychologists, social workers, medical assistants, laboratory technicians, health workers, medial records personnel, health educators, office workers, and volunteers.

Over 97% of the population served is Latino, with 86% being recent immigrants from Central or South America and 55% originally from El Salvador. The majority speaks little English; many are illiterate in Spanish and in English, with over 90% being most comfortable communicating with their provider in Spanish. Up to 90% have no health insurance and 95% have incomes below the federal poverty level. La Clinica was and remains the only bilingual, bicultural medical clinic that provides entirely free care to Latinos in the greater Washington area, serving the uninsured and underinsured, La Clinica Del Pueblo serves over 5,500 patients with over 31,000 patient visits per year.