Phillip Chen, Health Deputy from the Office of Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich, visited the Asian Pacific Health Care Venture, Inc. Wednesday August 6th. Miya Iwataki, Interim Board President and Kazue Shibata, CEO gave a tour of the organization to Mr. Chen. “You provide a very comprehensive service here and are addressing a very important gap in the service – linguistically sensitive service to diverse Asian and Latino groups,” commented Mr. Chen. Ms. Shibata communicated that the current PPP program and its allocation method pose challenge as APHCV and other Asian clinics are located in the SPA 4 which has been determined as “over-equity” SPA thus will not get any additional funding until “under equity SPAs” are funded up to per. Those clinics that provide language access to many of Asian language groups draw patients from all areas of the county seeking language access.

“APHCV supports the PPP allocation method because we wanted to support the clinics located in the under-equity SPAs, but it was a hard decision to support as we are also serving many patients from under-equity SPAs, but the decision left us hanging without solution for those clinics that serve language minority groups,” Ms. Shibata spoke. Ms. Iwataki agreed, “APHCV can not refer its patients out to other clinics as they don’t have the language capacity, so by not further funding the program, in effect, you are not meeting the needs of growing Asian patients who need PPP type of services.”