Field Placement: Office of the Patient Advocate (OPA)
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Preceptor: Cori Reifman
Student Name: Cheri Agonia
Year: 2002

My 400 hours of field work for the Community Health Sciences requirement was conducted at the Office of the Patient Advocate (OPA). OPA is an independent California State office that was established in July 2000 under the Business, Transportation, and Housing Agency and created by Governor Gray Davis and the Secretary of Business, Transportation and Housing (Maria Contreras-Sweet). The mission of the Office of the Patient Advocate is to provide California's consumers of managed health care with the guidance, advocacy and support necessary to obtain the best possible health care provided by their health plans.

My main project at OPA was assisting my preceptor, Cori Reifman, M.P.H. with the Cultural and Linguistic Services section of the Year 2 California HMO Report Card. Information was collected from 21 health plans about the cultural and linguistic services that plans offer their members whose primary language is not English or members who use American Sign Language. I assisted in performing qualitative data analysis (descriptive statistics including frequencies and cross-tabulations) of the data collected from the survey. I also participated in weekly meetings between OPA and the Report Card contractor in order to communicate the cultural and linguistic data into the Report Card's website, as well as a printed version of the Report Card that will be launched on September 23, 2002.

Because the survey collected a large amount of information from the Plans, not all of the data could be reported on the website and the printed version of the Report Card. Therefore, I was also involved in writing a comprehensive Cultural and Linguistic Report that will be completed in October of 2002.

Providing information on HMO services in other languages will allow the consumer to select a health plan/HMO that meets their language/cultural needs. This in turn will help foster better communication between consumers and their doctor and/or HMOs and plays a role in helping to reduce disparities in health care.

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