Forever in Its Prime

UC Irvine-developed dual-degree program that trains physician-activists to care for the underserved Latino population celebrates its 20th year

As president of the 10-campus University of California system, former UC Irvine Chancellor Michael V. Drake oversees nearly 300,000 students. In his office in Oakland, he has pictures of his family, famous people he’s met and a few students. One of them is of eight UC Irvine medical school graduates – the inaugural 2004 cohort in a game-changing program designed to create leaders and physician-activists dedicated to providing care to the underserved Latino community.

This past fall, the Program in Medical Education for the Latino Community celebrated its 20th anniversary. Its two main champions were Drake, a physician who at the time was vice president for health affairs for the UC system, and the late Dr. Alberto Manetta, former associate dean of UC Irvine’s School of Medicine and an outspoken advocate for the marginalized.

“I look at you every day,” Drake said to one of the PRIME-LC graduates in the photo, Dr. Sarah Lopez, as chuckles rippled throughout the Sue & Bill Gross Nursing and Health Sciences Hall during a ceremony that reunited 145 PRIME-LC graduates on Oct. 18. “You make us so proud,” Drake said to them.

So far, 172 students have successfully completed PRIME-LC, a five-year M.D./master’s degree track that by 2007 had been adopted at the five other UC medical schools.

Applicants to PRIME-LC can be of any ethnicity. The goal is to find future doctors who will be particularly suited to caring for Latino patients and members of other underserved communities. But most PRIME-LC graduates are Latinos, who make up only 6 percent of active doctors in California.

“PRIME-LC is crucial because it works to address both the disparities in health outcomes among Latino patients and the lack of trust felt by the community,” Lopez said after the event. “There’s a gap in culturally relevant care that can lead to miscommunication, mistrust and poorer outcomes.”

Read the full story in UC Irvine Magazine.