After 23 years of service at South Cove Community Health Center (SCCHC), the current CEO, Eugene Welch, will be stepping down from his position at the end of 2022. Started by a group of community activists in 1972 in response to the inadequate health care services for the local residents in Boston Chinatown, SCCHC now operates in five locations in the greater Boston area and serves more than 32,000 patients annually. SCCHC aims to improve the health and wellbeing of all medically underserved populations in Massachusetts. With a special focus on non-English speaking Asian American patients, SCCHC is staffed with native language speakers including Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodian to provide linguistically and culturally accessible health care. Mr. Welch has helped SCCHC reach its patients and it is now the largest Asian primary care provider in Massachusetts.
Sampan: How did you start at South Cove? How did it expand from one to five locations?
Welch: I originally started as a consultant to look at some of the problems South Cove had at the time. Three years later I became the executive director which I have been for the last 19 years. When I first started here, we only had one location. We had around 12,000 patients. Today we have five locations and we have around 36,000 patients annually and about 170,000 medical visits. Our first location was too small, and we couldn’t hold enough services. We bought another building in Chinatown and expanded other departments there including adult medicine, PD, social services. We raise and receive money from the federal government and opened two more wonderful facilities in Quincy, now the largest Asian community in Massachusetts (with about 30,000 Asian residents), especially serving medically underserved patients.
Sampan: What led you to a career in Asian health services?
Welch: If you are going to give good health services, there’s no difference if it is Asian, Polish, Caucasian… You need to set a quality and higher people who can offer that quality. The only difference is we have taken a lot of time and effort to hire doctors, nurse practitioners, medical assistants and all kinds of staff who speak an Asian language plus English so they can deal directly with the patients. It’s pretty unique. Now we have patients coming from somewhere around 125 to 140 zip codes because of our focus on language and culture. In the past few years, we opened a fifth location in Malden. In Chinatown, we have more elderly patients. In Quincy, we’re serving elderly patients but also serving all ages of patients. This year we celebrate 50 years of serving the Asian population. We had a mission, and we still live by our mission to medically and logistically serve Asians who cannot speak English. There are still a lot of them even though they are not coming into the country as fast. We welcome all patients who come, and we help fill out 25,000 insurance applications a year to get people access to Mass Health services.
Sampan: What was the state of Asian health care when you first started and how has it changed?
Welch: Asian health care 25 years ago was poor because most providers only spoke English and it was very difficult. They didn’t always want to deal with patients or through interpretations. So that is why we have decided that we are going to find providers that speak an Asian language, that comes from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China who knows the customs and the people. We want to give good care to our patients and that’s what we do. We are like a big doctor’s office. We see patients and a lot of our providers are their primary care doctors. But if they need some type of care that we do not have, we either refer them into BI, Beth Israel Lahey Health or Tufts. We have 10 interpreters at BI and Tufts. For example, if you were a Cantonese speaking patient, we would have a Cantonese interpreter meet you at your referral so you can get access to the doctor who can provide the care.
Sampan: What impediments existed for Asians to access health care? Have they been removed?
Welch: Still not completely removed. You need to try to determine what type of care Asians might need, or where they have experienced more problems. (I don’t want to broadcast but) We have a lot of diabetic patients who need to be treated with medications. You can keep treating them by keeping track of their blood test, and we have a nutritionist who can advise them on their nutrition intake. In the culture, everybody has three bowls of white rice a day. But the white rice is completely carbs that turn into sugar. For example, our nutritionist may suggest patients to have two bowls, or one bowl instead, to improve their health. In addition, we are finding more cancer and hypertension in the Asian community. We are now doing 5,000 mammography screening a year and if we find something, we get a diagnostic evaluation and find them to BI or Tufts. Whether it is cancer or hypertension, we are trying to determine and treat the symptoms that are affecting Asian patients first.
Sampan: Are there any specific challenges South Cove faced during COVID?
Welch: It was a lot of challenges. In the beginning, before they got the new shots out, Moderna and Pfizer especially, people are dying. Thousands of people died in this country. Now, if you have a shot, you might catch COVID and be sick for a few days, but you’re not going to die. And most of the time, you don’t even need to go to the hospital. So, it is important for people to know that taking the shot cannot hurt you; it can only prevent you from dying in the future. We happen to be lucky. We’re a 330 federally funded health center. We get the federal fund from the federal government. During the Coronavirus, we gave out over 41,000 shots to Asian patients with the Coronavirus. Now we are doing flu shots and we are trying to give to the community what is the most important at the time. We will go back and give more shots for the Coronavirus if it seems like it will never completely go away. That is why we hire a good medical team to be always working on the frontline.
Sampan: As you retire, what are your hopes for South Cove and the state of Asian health care inthe U.S.? Are you optimistic?
Welch: I’m always optimistic. You can’t be in this business and not be optimistic. It depends on the economy, who’s running the government? How much money is available? If the economy gets tight, they may start cutting budgets. There are many factors that can affect what we are planning on doing in the future. But at least we can hold on to what we are doing and do a good job until things pick up again.
I certainly have enjoyed my experience working here. It’s a pretty remarkable community that has allowed me, as a Caucasian, to come in and allow me to run a community health center and hopefully bring it to a better spot in the future. We think the Asian community is very thankful for getting health care. They are very realistic and try to keep themselves healthy and hopefully we do our part to help them achieve that.
Currently, there are some major Asian health centers around the United States including in California and New York. The Asian population is still only about 8% of the entire population. And the thing we should make sure to remind them is that they need to get out and vote. Because if you want to be heard by the politicians or people who control the money, you need to show them that you are voting and you are a good voting bloc. You can vote them in or out of office.
I just want to end the interview by thanking first of all, the staff of South Cove for all the wonderful work they did over the last 23 years, and how wonderful and loyal they have been to SC, our patients and the community. Nothing can ever be done by one person. I also would like to thank the people of the community for always being available and supportive in all the different areas we have clinics. I wish all nothing but good fortune and health in the future.
