In partnership with Puentes de Salud, a Philadelphia nonprofit health center that primarily cares for low-income Spanish-speaking patients, two Penn Medicine urology residents are leading an effort to provide free vasectomies at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center’s outpatient urology clinic to patients without access to insurance that would cover the procedure.
It’s about more than offering free vasectomies to an underserved population: chief urology resident Esther Nivasch Turner, and first-year urology resident Christopher Herrera, want to make sure that the men have the same patient-care experience as anyone else coming to Penn Medicine, regardless of whether they are documented, have insurance, or speak English.
“We’re making sure that these patients get the experience that any patient in our clinics would get—that they get literally the same discharge instructions, the same pre-op instructions ... the same experience, other than the fact that they might be a Spanish speaker,” Herrera says.
Working under Puneet Masson, Penn’s director of Male Reproductive Medicine and Surgery, Nivasch Turner and Herrera received a grant from the Bach Fund, which supports PPMC projects, to cover 20 vasectomies for Puentes patients. The first two surgeries were performed in late February and March.
Read more at Penn Medicine News.
