Help foreign doctors relocate to NM, US

FOR ALMOST 16 years, I had the great opportunity to advocate and assist individuals/ families resettling in our state —among them, at least two dozen were MDs and scores more other medical professionals. At this time, only two of the MDs I knew personally managed to re-establish their practice of medicine in New Mexico. I would say that the lack of minimum assistance or investment by the federal government, state government, our major health care providers or our UNM School of Medicine is the fault.

I spoke to a dean of the UNM School of Medicine, executives at health care providers, various state and federal politicians and their staffs and directly to the N.M. Medical Board at one of their meetings. I explained that ... Those we label undesirable and refugees include qualified professionals, including doctors. However, the U.S. resettlement program does not offer assistance to relocated medical professionals. Instead, it counts its amount of support in months. Doctors, nurses, etc., are not elevated for their professional competencies. Competent individuals are not assisted with focused financial support to use their skills and knowledge in our health care settings. A somewhat dated statistic from the time, but it is significant that Florida is supposedly home to over 2,400 Cuban doctors that migrated here through asylum offered by the federal government and weren’t given assistance to practice medicine by our society. Really! The goal was just decades of disruption of Cuba’s foreign aid throughout Latin America Perhaps N.M. politicians and media could ban “refugees” and use less dehumanizing terms as descriptors .... If such professionals had been vetted for competency and skill and then given focused assistance to transition into their professions here, it would not solve our shortages of medicinal professionals. Still, it would have certainly bolstered the qualitative and quantitative statistics.

JIM GANNON Rio Rancho