On Life Support
Congress has erased the funding for dozens of minority-focused medical training centers, leaving them scrambling to stay afloat.
By Jamal Watson
NEW YORK CITY
At the Hispanic Center of Excellence, located on the sprawling campus of the Albert Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx, no one is singing the blues. The lights are on and the students are busy at work. The center’s staff remains focused on its primary goal — to mentor and train a new generation of Hispanics to enter the medical profession.
That’s not an easy task, particularly when only 3.2 percent of doctors in the United States are Hispanic, according to the American Medical Association’s statistics. The job becomes even more difficult when one of the few federally funded programs in the country charged with producing new Hispanic physicians gets its entire funding cut.
The Office of Management and Budget, a federal department that assists President Bush in overseeing the preparation of the federal budget, recently told the staff at the Center of Excellence that they would not receive the three years of funding that they had been promised because the services they offered were considered “ineffective.”
“I think they’re just wrong,” says Dr. Hal Strelnick, the center’s
director and a 25-year veteran of the college, which is based at Yeshiva University. Yeshiva is ranked 18th for awarding medical
degrees to minorities in Diverse’s Top 100 Graduate edition (see Diverse, July 13).
