The City of Compton, California and community of North Long Beach, California continue to experience extraordinary barriers to lifesaving medical care. With the highest rates of maternal mortality, infant mortality, and homicide in Los Angeles County, these areas lack essential lifesaving medical services including, a high-risk hospital-based birthing center, a neonatal intensive care unit, and a level-one trauma center. Furthermore, individuals in these communities suffer higher rates of blindness, amputation, kidney failure, heart attack and stroke, the negative sequelae of chronic medical conditions such as uncontrolled diabetes mellitus and uncontrolled hypertension. It is no wonder, therefore, that the life expectancy in Compton and North Long Beach are 77.1 years and 78.9 years respectively, compared 87.5 years among the “best performing city or community” in Los Angeles County.

Through CHIP interviews, I was connected with a group of individuals who are passionate about improving the access to health care in Compton, California. In the fall of 2022, we created the Compton Health Equity Collaborative. Overall, we believe that with California boasting one of the highest GDP per capita in the US and having the fifth largest economy in the world, there is no reason why we cannot work together to provide Compton and North Long Beach with culturally and linguistically appropriate life-sustaining medical care.

Our overarching goal is to empower community members to be the architects of the way health care is delivered in their communities and to build capacity among community members to provide basic and advance health care services. This is a long-term project where we envision a comprehensive health care center and a corresponding hospital run and staffed by individuals from the community with the lived experiences to meet their friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors' needs.