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Migrant Clinicians Network was created because clinicians of heart and conscience
saw that they were faced with the same challenges, regardless of the setting.
Their experience was that migrant families were essentially voiceless,
and as the clinicians who serve them, they weren't much better off.
From that simple yet compelling beginning,
MCN has harnessed the force of thousands of clinicians serving migrants
to provide peer support, resources, innovative programs, and quality education to help these
underserved mobile populations.
Our commitment is to create practical solutions at the intersection of poverty migration and health.
Our ongoing objective is to energize and prepare healthcare providers everywhere to
care for patients, who by virtue of the need to move to remain
employed, suffer even greater challenges and structural injustice.
This means strengthening our financial sustainability, building MCN's capacity through broadening
our base of foundation and other support,
building our visibility with the public and online, and strengthening alliances with the
healthcare community beyond migration health.
What makes MCN successful is our commitment to individuals, whether patients or providers.
We leverage our programs to create individual and systemic change.
Having started at the grassroots level to address health disparities and the absence of health services,
to now also cooperating with federal and state health agencies.
We are in a unique position to bridge between the governmental and private sectors,
linking the theoretical, political, and practical.
As a network of clinicians we have strength beyond our numbers.
What makes MCN effective is our reach.
Migrant workers are among the most marginalized populations in this country.
They suffer mortality rates greater than most segments of the work force
and their voices are rarely heard by policy and decisions makers.
We have been instrumental in shaping national and international initiatives and policy
related to public health, migration health and infectious disease.
MCN uses both qualitative and quantitative measures to evaluate our success.
We measure outcomes against goals
then adapt and adjust to strengthen our programs and services.
Our staff provides technical assistance and training on migration health topics.
These include cultural and social factors affecting care family violence, TB, worker
safety, and environmental and occupational health.
We do this through clinic site visits, training at conferences and webinars
for doctors, nurses, and other health professionals.
We've been able to demonstrate that measures of success for healthcare benchmarks in the
general population can be met, matched, or exceeded for migrants.
There's a perception that because MCN had its origins for healthcare in farm workers
as a deeply needful population that we're still focused solely on that population.
What we've done is taken the lessons learned to address the problems they've faced as a result of mobility
and applied them to many other populations affected by migration.
We also want to make clear that we haven't confined
ourselves to the problems that are urgently in front of us.
We really try to look to the future and more broadly about what creates a healthy work force.
Children of migrant workers face environmental risks that most of us can't imagine
from pesticides in and around their homes to unsafe drinking water.
MCN brought healthcare justice to the front lines to create safer home environments.
We developed a program that trained graduate students and promotores de salud, or community health workers,
on ways to limit risks. Then they went door to door in migrant communities
to evaluate behavior and teach families simple practices to limit their children's exposure.
Our health network program truly saves lives, ensuring that pregnant women receive continuity of care
to deliver normal birth weight babies and patients with chronic and infectious disease
receive the treatment wherever they migrate for work.
The historical challenge is that we serve populations marginalized on a number of fronts.
They have fewer protections than other workers, some have precarious immigration status
and many face the stigma of being foreign born.
As clinicians we want to serve them. Because of their circumstances they have more
health problems and are more vulnerable. Many clinicians are isolated with little peer
support and few resources to address not just the curative health paradigm
but the public health paradigm. We work to address that.
We've always engaged in proof of concept. Can a program be developed that is specific
for migrant populations and be effective? With additional resources we would expand
and extend our familial and partner violence prevention program for migrant men
then take it deeper into communities that don't have access to resources.
Well woman and prenatal care are other areas we would pursue further,
especially since these populations have restricted access to education and care.
We'd also focus on young women to make sure that they come into the health
care system with the understanding that proper screening
for breast and cervical cancer is important.
Workers who migrate for employment are drawn to specific industries known as the three D's-
They receive limited education about risks and protections and their rights.
MCN would fill that gap by extending our education and outreach to workers in other low wage jobs
to improve health and safety in other patient groups.
Implementation and intervention of focus programs
to target specific work groups would truly give workers a sense of the occupational
and environmental risks they face.