Young-hee Park goes to Kheir Clinic every few months for blood work to manage her diabetes. Staff call her when it’s time for screenings she might otherwise forget.
But she also goes for help with things that have nothing to do with medicine.
When something arrives in the mail that she doesn’t understand, she brings it in and someone sits down with her to figure it out.
“I don’t speak English,” Park, 61, said. “If I had to go somewhere else and do everything in English, I wouldn’t be able to.”
Kheir Clinic, where she’s been coming to for the last 15 years, she said “takes care of things I have a hard time doing myself.”
Park is one of many patients who have passed through Kheir Clinic over the last four decades. The nonprofit community health center began as a small social service organization and has grown into a multi-site provider serving one of the most densely populated immigrant neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
Founded in 1986 by decorated U.S. Army officer Young Oak Kim, the Korean Health Education, Information and Research Center was created to help Korean immigrants navigate language barriers and access basic services in Los Angeles.
“Up until about 1999, it was all social services,” said Navid Papehn, the organization’s chief clinical officer.
It wasn’t until 2000 that Kheir opened a two-room medical clinic at 266 S. Harvard Blvd. in Koreatown, responding to a growing need for medical care.
The organization operates six clinics all within a relatively small radius in Koreatown, meant to accommodate patients who rely on public transportation or walk. The sites serve tens of thousands of patients each year, offering services ranging from blood work and oral exams to prenatal care and mental health therapy.
More than 90% of Kheir patients live well below the federal poverty line, and nearly 70% are best served in a language other than English, according to an annual report. Kheir currently provides a full range of services in Bengali, English, Korean, Spanish, and Thai.
Kheir expanded its services with a new pharmacy last year and a pediatric clinic on Olympic Boulevard this year.
The social services component has remained a priority for the organization.
Down a hallway from the exam rooms at the 6th Street clinic is the patient resources department, where patients walk in with questions about insurance, but also other notices that have nothing to do with health care.
“There isn’t really a limit to what we can receive and consult on. We’ve seen many, many phone bills, many gas bills, electric bills, which is not written anywhere in our handbook that we consult people on SoCalGas bills,” said James An, who directs the department.
The department has expanded from a staff of two or three to about 10 since Papehn joined in 2015. They have built long-term relationships with patients, some of whom have been coming to the clinic for 20 years.
“That sense of connection is very important. I think it moves things smoothly and brings that level of trust that I think is required these days within the community,” he said.
In the past year, the clinic has also produced and posted multilingual videos on YouTube explaining coming changes to health care programs, including what documents patients need and how to prepare. The Korean-language video on upcoming changes to Medi-Cal, for instance, has over 38,000 views.
“I think everybody’s hungry for information. They want to be prepared. They want to know what’s coming and they want to know what they need to do to be prepared,” An said. “On the federal, state or local level, I don’t think these elected officials have a grasp on how difficult it is to navigate these changes, and especially for communities that don’t speak English, or are elderly, or whatever. The government is really bad at conducting outreach on different things.”
For many patients, like Park, who are not comfortable conversing in English, Kheir is crucial to navigating daily life. Recently, staff helped restore her Medi-Cal coverage after she was mistakenly disenrolled and billed more than $800 for critical treatments she cannot afford.
“The best thing is that I can speak Korean to the staff and doctors,” she said. “If I go somewhere else and have to do everything in English, I just can’t do it.”
Koreatown, along with nearby communities like Thai Town and Little Bangladesh, has grown increasingly diverse over the years. In response, the clinic has expanded its language services and outreach efforts.
Little Bangladesh, a sub-neighborhood in Koreatown that occupies four blocks on 3rd Street between Vermont and Normandie avenues, is roughly a 10-minute walk from the clinic on 6th Street.
“I think it was clear to us that there weren’t a lot of services available to them in their language at the time,” Papehn said. “And we started to think that this is a population that we should connect with.”
The clinic also hired doctors who could speak one of the five core languages the clinic offers services in, including Dr. Ida Tuwatananurak, a Thai and English bilingual provider who’s been with the center for eight years.
“We let the community know that we have a Thai doctor here, and there was interest,” Papehn said. “Although it’s not a huge population for us right now, it’s slowly growing, similar to how the Bangladeshi population grew for us as well.”
Tuwatananurak, who grew up in Cerritos and found community at the Wat Thai Temple in North Hollywood, said she went into medicine knowing how difficult it can be to navigate health care without clear information. She saw that in her community all throughout high school and college, and wanted to work close to Thai Town to serve that population.
“There are so many folks that go without medical care, they’ll save up their money and fly back to Thailand for medical care and then fly back to the U.S. These are people with status that should have insurance or should qualify for Medi-Cal,” she said.
Care truly changes when a patient can speak in their own language to a doctor, Tuwatananurak said.
“When I started and patients were starting to know who I was, it was like pent up worries for the last 10 years that they would just give to you on their first visit,” she said. “It’s almost like a sense of relief from the patient that they’re able to fully explain what’s bothering them and not through a translator and interpreter.”
