The Lowell Community Health Center was awarded a $500,000 grant to develop a health residency program in partnership with Tufts Medical.
The goal is to better prepare future doctors when it comes to helping such a diverse city like Lowell and beyond.
Over 70% of the patients seen at the health center come from multicultural backgrounds, including the Hispanic, Black and Southeast Asian communities.
Through this new program the hope is to have these future physicians have a unique perspective on health justice and cultural understanding, said Dr. Kumble Rajesh, the Chief Medical Officer at Lowell Community Health Center.
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“They will learn about community health, about population health, which is important and it will be culturally appropriate.”
He added that they’ve been awarded more than $500,000 to train future doctors.
“Diversity, equity and inclusiveness of all of these aspects of health care that we provide here...will make it very important," he said.
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One of the unique experiences during this training will be at the Metta Health Center.
It’s one of the nation’s first fully integrated West meets East health facilities at Lowell Community Health Center.
"Metta means love and kindness or compassion in the Buddhist Pali language.”
Sidney Liang is the director of Metta and he tells us the center focuses on serving the health care needs of refugees and immigrants.
“Our staff here need to understand who are patients are, where they’re coming from. Their trauma, their history, their traditions, their religion.”
Most of the patients they help come from the Southeast Asian community, some who have never seen a doctor before.
Emphasizing that knowledge of their beliefs is essential in order to gain their trust, especially with medical procedures we consider so simple like the drawing of blood.
“when blood is taken from you, you lose part of your soul. So therefore a lot of people are afraid of that. Same thing when you’re poking somebody skin, you’re no longer pure.”
This program will be in partnership with Tufts Medicine and their vice president of education dr. Kari Roberts says this will help with the doctor shortage this nation is experiencing.
They expect to train 18 people per year.
“It’s really about serving people and in order to serve people you have to understand where they come from.”
Lowell Community Health Center will begin this residency in 2026 and it will be a three-year program.
