Asthma

screenings and concerns about their invasiveness in certain communities. How do we educate these communities to improve the overall rate of screenings? • Loss of life due to preventive cancers is a challenge we face every day. Education should not necessarily only fall onto the practitioner level. Cultural and peer-to-peer education is needed. Patients may not relate to a practitioner about screenings. We need to educate community members to help with this effort. • We are a culture that is family oriented and we focus on others, not ourselves. For economic reasons, or because we are taking care of children, we don’t do self-care at all. By the time we detect an issue, it’s often too late. In our community, we try to do early detection, but many people take an “I have what I have” fatalistic approach, and don’t want to find out what they have. The idea is if I don’t do the test, I don’t know what I have. • Screening is the best opportunity for reducing morbidity, but people who do not have health insurance are not getting screened. We need to adopt a population health model in which prevention is central. We need public health campaigns about screenings. We tell people not to smoke but we have to push harder to tell people to get screened; it’s the only way to bring the number down. • We need mammograms that are community-based. I dream of a mammogram machine in a community health center setting with Asian providers and staff who can speak their patients' language. • The Asian community has very high undocumented rates, so screening is much more difficult. Not as many specialty care resources are available. Care is very disjointed for the undocumented and uninsured, and that disproportionately affects immigrants. We have lots of resources out there. But getting people connected to resources and medical services is the issue. • A lot of work needs to be done with providers and healthcare systems to get people routinely checked and screened according to current national guidelines. For those populations that do not have health coverage, it is difficult for them to get preventive services. They tend to seek help only when there is an urgent need. • We are stuck in cycle in which providers do outreach, education and screenings. But where do patients go for their next stage of care? Work is being done to raise awareness that screenings are covered as preventive health with no cost to patient.

But if there is no place to send patients for the next level of care, then treatment is an issue.

Asthma

In Orange County, 15.2% of the population has been diagnosed with asthma and 89% has had symptoms in the past year, with 41.3% taking daily medication to control their asthma. Among county youth, 22.0% have been diagnosed with asthma, and 8.5% have visited an emergency department because of their asthma.

UCI Medical Center Community Health Needs Assessment 43