back to 2020 Annual Report

Celebrating Half a Century of Community Impact

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a profound impact on the health, social and economic well-being of people in our community and around the globe. Sadly, many in our community have experienced its tragic consequences, including the suffering and loss of loved ones, lost jobs and livelihoods, and reduced social connections and isolation.

While the COVID-19 pandemic affects us all, long-standing systemic health and social inequities have put many people from racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk. We need to improve the health, social and economic conditions for these populations to achieve health equity and to protect us all from the threat of COVID-19 and future pandemics. The pandemic reminds us that access to healthcare is a basic human right that we are not all afforded.

We have always recognized that a healthy community is more than just access to clinical care. A healthy community encompasses all facets of life that make a community thrive. As a pandemic and an economic crisis upend everything around us, and as we celebrate the impact of our work over the past half century, it is a worthy exercise to reflect on our core values that ground us in our mission and our accomplishments in order to face the current crisis with resolve.

During the pandemic, we continued to build technological solutions and infrastructure to support our community. We implemented our Electronic Health Record system and joined the California Immunization Registry, which will allow us to keep better track of immunizations and better communication with our patients. We continued our work in telehealth, which has helped overcome barriers, such as transportation, lack of childcare, and other structural and economic obstacles that have prevented our families from accessing care.  And while we recognize the many benefits of this care delivery option that results in cost savings for the healthcare delivery system, we also learned about its limitations: families we work with often lack Wi-Fi, or even access to appropriate technological resources to benefit from this innovation.

We partnered with grassroots community-based organizations such as Resilient Fruitvale that focuses on health and racial equity, diversity, and inclusion. We also saw that there are segments of our community that are more affected than others by food insecurity, housing inadequacies and infection rates based solely on their ZIP Code.

We are very proud of all our clinical staff, physicians, dentists, social workers, health educators, and others on the front-lines caring for our patients during these unprecedented times. Many of our employees are as vulnerable as the patients we serve. They live in the same neighborhoods, contending with the same challenges. The need to stop the spread of COVID-19 through testing, stepping up vaccinations, and overcoming vaccine hesitancy makes our role as a community clinic even more relevant and important today. We have been and continue to be a trusted source in the communities we serve.

As we celebrate our 50th Anniversary, the words “thank you” are not nearly enough to express our gratitude for the support that La Clínica has received from our community. Most important, through all the challenges we experienced in 2020, we came together as an organization with strong support from our patients and community members who showed fierce resilience, perseverance and commitment to make a positive difference in the lives of all those we serve. The most recent impact of these efforts is detailed in this Annual Report.

Here’s to 50 more years!

¡Sí se puede!

Jane García, La Clínica CEO