Becerra unveils program for health care workers
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra and Mayor Sheng Thao appeared together in Oakland on Thursday to announce a program intended to boost the diversity of the nation’s health care workers.
In brief remarks at Samuel Merritt University, Becerra said HHS’ new Health Workforce Initiative would ensure that medical students from underserved communities have the resources they need to succeed — and that those communities would benefit from their talent.
“We’re growing the number of graduate medical education residency slots in communities that are underserved, so we can make sure that we’re planting the seed of a new doctor, another nurse in that community,” Becerra said.
The event in Oakland was Becerra’s second stop in the state on Thursday as part of a campaign “to highlight the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to tackle food insecurity and increase investment in our nation’s workforce,” according to a news release.
Earlier in the day Becerra appeared in Sacramento at UC Davis Medical Center, which has a farmto-fork program that partners with farms to provide patients and staff with locally grown food.
In Oakland, he first toured the university’s Health Sciences Simulation Center before holding a discussion with “community leaders focused on improving the health care workforce,” according to the news release.
At the news conference, Thao described how the new program would benefit someone like her mother, who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Laos without knowing English.
“Having someone who looks like you, having someone who speaks your language and can connect with you on a personal level, is everything,” Thao said.
The initiative announced Thursday builds off HHS’ Health Workforce Strategic Plan 2021, a program to support medical workers and caregivers still in the throes of the pandemic.
Mariah Wolfe, a graduate student at Samuel Merritt who is working to become a family nurse practitioner, said she was overjoyed at the announcement. Going into medicine “can be very challenging and incredibly overwhelming to navigate at times, especially as a minority,” she said. “This is helping to provide that extra guidance.”
“Knowing that there’s going to be the opportunity for us to be placed in those communities and help develop and grow those communities and provide care to those underserved populations is really exciting,” she said.