UCI: Medical Students Open Prenatal Clinic for Low-Income Hispanic Women

      Medical students from the University of California-Irvine Saturday opened a prenatal care clinic to serve the area's low-income Hispanic women, the Orange County Register reports. The Madres del Futuro (Mothers of the Future) Clinic, the university's first student-operated clinic, offers pregnancy testing, prenatal classes, family planning and other services at minimal cost in order to improve access to health services for this population. According to the Orange County Health Care Agency, one quarter of Hispanics do not have health insurance. "I think the primary thing is to make [prenatal care] easy for them to get to," Dr. Thomas Garite, professor and chair of UCI Medical Center's department of obstetrics and gynecology, said. The clinic, an effort that took two years of student planning, is funded by the HealthCare Foundation of Orange County (Canto, 4/30).