Lopez-Veron, Pablo, Guillermo

MayView Community Health Center is a local non-profit organization devoted to providing essential primary health care services to low-income families and individuals who live and work in the northern part of Santa Clara County and the southern-most part of San Mateo County. The physicians at MayView practice family-based primary care, with the capacity to deal with more complex health problems, chronic illnesses and participation in mandated managed care programs. Despite being residents of one of the most affluent areas in California, many of our patients have difficulty accessing medical services. They are the working and non-working poor who are employed in service industries which provide the lowest wages and no health insurance coverage. They face financial, language and transportation barriers as they live their lives among us. If our clinics were not here to serve them, many of our patients would not have access to good health care. We are a community-responsive practice. This means that we believe we share with our patients a duty to safeguard the health of the community as a whole. A healthy community depends on healthy individuals and families. We do this by providing primary medical care to all who come to us for services, no matter whether they can contribute to the cost of their care or not. Community based care also means that the clinic belongs to the community as a whole. We depend on this wider group to help define needs and to contribute the means to support the services we provide.