In the Right Care
Patricia Rodriguez has felt her calling is to serve others. Her roots confirmed it, but her position at Children’s Medical has helped her grow as a Latina physician.
Patricia Rodriguez, M.D., grew up straddling different worlds.
There were the worlds of her Mexican-American father and Mexican immigrant mother.
And there was her own world.
Raised in a Houston neighborhood with few families that looked like hers, Rodriguez’s friends and classmates were mostly white.
“You feel like you walk alone. You are on a journey that’s unique and that not many people can understand. It’s a lonely road sometimes,” she said.
But it’s this intersectionality of backgrounds that has equipped her to tackle the root of disparities in health care at Children’s Health℠, where she has served for the last year as Chief Health Equity and Inclusion Officer.
Rodriguez was recruited by leaders at Children’s Health three years ago to create a Hispanic Health Program – a population health initiative to tailor the hospital system’s workflow to the growing Hispanic population. In Dallas County, more than half of its childhood population is Hispanic, according to the 2017 Beyond ABC report, an in-depth look at the quality of life for children in North Texas published by Children’s Health.
Since then, she’s been working to establish the infrastructure for such a program, starting with efforts to implement processes addressing health disparities.
“We can provide equal care, but there are barriers and other issues that prevent certain people and populations from reaching that highest level of health,” she said, listing off examples ranging from health literacy to challenges outside the hospital system like poverty, education and food deserts that limit families’ access to fresh fruits and vegetables.
“Addressing those other issues behooves us as a health care system if we really are looking to improve health outcomes.”
Becoming a Physician
Rodriguez was 6 years old when she flipped open an encyclopedia to a page of the human body. She studied the pictures outlining the body’s skeletal and circulatory systems.
She didn’t know what these drawings meant, but she was mesmerized.
“I told myself, ‘One day, I’m going to figure this out. I have to figure out the human body,’” she said. “I told my mom I wanted to be a doctor, and that was it.”
Rodriguez is the eighth member of her family to become a physician, but the first American doctor.
She said the medical landscape has changed, and it is now more commonplace to find women in medicine. But it’s her layers of being a bicultural, bilingual, Hispanic female that have shaped a different perspective from other physicians.
“We are a unicorn,” she said of Hispanic female physicians.
And in a room of male physician colleagues, she’s doubted whether she belonged to stand beside them – or even in front of them.
“You show up to give a presentation or talk about an initiative, and you feel that imbalance,” Rodriguez said. “Even though you’re a M.D. just like them, and you can do everything just like them, you feel very small. It’s a struggle to not feel like that.”
Rodriguez grew up with parents who were supportive of education and fostered independence in their three children. When Rodriguez was a toddler and wanted to pick out her own clothes or fix her own plate of food, her mom let her.
Her parents praised her every accomplishment and believed in her dreams.
“When I was a kid and would tell my mom and dad I wanted to be a doctor, they’d say, ‘You can do anything you want to. Don’t ever stop trying,’” Rodriguez said. “They believed in us.”
Caring for Everyone
On Friday afternoons, Rodriguez drapes a stethoscope around her neck and provides care to patients at Children’s Health with a team of residents. Also, a clinical volunteer faculty member at UT Southwestern Medical Center, she continues to care for patients at the bedside while holding an administrative leadership position in the hospital system.
“I still examine kids. I will never, ever give that up. That is who I am,” she said.
Rodriguez’ roots as a physician also help further her efforts to improve health equity at Children’s Health, where she is working with fellow physicians to implement systems to tailor their plan of care to each individual patient and their specific needs.
In early May, her department launched a pilot initiative to screen for social determinants of health and dig into topics beyond the typical medical questionnaire, inquiring about patient’s health literacy, food insecurity, financial insecurity, housing quality and transportation access.
The initiative aims to transform the care patients receive by looking at their health holistically -- beyond just their medical needs -- and connect them to community resources. It also helps doctors understand the patient’s risk for readmission, risk for extended length of stay, risk of not following the treatment plan or risk of not showing up to appointments.
“I feel like my purpose in life is to help others,” Rodriguez said. “To help be the one to shed light on the important factors of how we can take care of everyone and not just some people.”