Committed to a Healthy Community

It’s high noon at Ventura County’s busiest public health clinic and the pace is just starting to pick up.

The waiting room is packed with wailing babies, paramedics are wheeling away an elderly man gasping for breath, and most of the clinic’s 18 exam rooms are crammed with patients in need of anything from flu shots to prenatal screenings.

Through it all, medical director Miguel Cervantes stays calm and focused.

The 40-year-old physician takes as much time as he needs with each patient, cooing at babies and talking his elderly charges through complicated diagnoses and procedures, shifting into his native Spanish when necessary to make sure they understand.

“We want to provide a quality of care that you would expect at a private doctor’s office, and I think we have done that,” says Cervantes, who has been medical director at the Las Islas Family Clinic since it opened in 1991.

“Our whole goal when we started was to bring the highest quality medical care to a population that had been underserved,” he added. “It’s the same population that most reflects where I came from.”

Cervantes comes from an Oxnard farm worker family. His dad worked the fields for nearly 40 years; his mom still works part time packing peppers. He stooped long hours himself, starting at the age of 9, cutting endless rows of flowers and vowing to do more with his life.

A straight-A student at Camarillo High School, he used long hours of study and government aid to get through UCLA’s undergraduate program, then its vaunted medical school, before entering the nationally recognized family practice residency program at Ventura County Medical Center.

While he had plenty of offers to join private physician groups when he finished, he jumped at the chance in 1991 to help launch the south Oxnard clinic, driven by a desire to elevate the quality of medical care in this mostly Latino community.

By many accounts he has succeeded.

The full-service clinic sees more than 50,000 patients a year, nearly double the patient visits at the county’s second busiest clinic, the West Ventura Family Care Center.

In addition to handling a full patient load, Cervantes oversees the clinic’s 50 employees and helps teach doctors going through the county hospital’s family practice program.

He is currently orchestrating an expansion at the clinic aimed at boosting urgent care, better serving chronically ill patients and keeping the facility open seven days a week.

Cervantes believes in leading by example. He often works through his lunch hour. And he regularly comes in on his days off to deliver babies, check test results or just see how his patients are doing.

“He loves his work and his patients love him,” said Dolores Lopez, the doctor’s medical assistant. “Some won’t see anyone else.”

He lives in Oxnard, a few miles from the clinic and the home where his parents have lived for more than 20 years. But they didn’t always have that kind of permanence.

Cervantes and his nine brothers and sisters spent plenty of time with their parents on the migrant trail, following the crops from community to community and living wherever they could. Because the family was poor and there were so many mouths to feed, Cervantes used to work after school and on the weekends alongside his father.

As the elder Cervantes picked vegetables, he planted the idea that a good education was the key to a better life.

“I told him that he needed to study, that he needed to be an example for his brothers and sisters,” said 67-year-old Miguel Cervantes Sr., who stopped working in the fields only in recent years.

“He wants to work in this community, he wants to help people less fortunate than him,” he said. “We are very proud of him.”

Indeed, the younger Cervantes chooses to work in this community. He earns a base salary of $105,000 a year, plus several thousand dollars more for running the clinic and bonuses for meeting a range of incentives.

The doctor says he’s got no complaints about pay. He knows he could earn more if he wanted to, either in private practice or by joining any number of physician groups, but he says he’s got no desire to do so.

That level of dedication is not lost on his superiors.

“He is a family practice doctor in the truest sense,” said Bill Wood, who oversees the county’s 22 outpatient clinics. “He truly is someone who cares about that community and who has gone back to serve it.”

Added Supervisor John Flynn, who worked with Cervantes on the clinic’s expansion: “I think he’s done a remarkable job. He has told me that he wants to remain here and serve the community from which he came, and I admire him for that.”

In the pediatric ward at the county’s medical center in Ventura last week, Cervantes was busy serving up his best bedside manner.

Down on one knee, he examined 7-month-old Maria Guadalupe, whom he had admitted earlier in the week with a urinary tract infection. The baby, a thick thatch of black hair crowning her head and an intravenous needle in her arm, gurgled and smiled and played with Cervantes’ stethoscope.

Cervantes talked to Guadalupe Vasquez, the baby’s mother, a longtime patient of his, about how her daughter was getting along. He asked a series of questions in a soothing Spanish, about fever and appetite and sleep patterns.

In the end, he pronounced Maria Guadalupe ready to be discharged. He later explained that she had previously been seen in the emergency room of a private hospital where Vasquez was told the baby only had a cold.

“The baby would have just continued to get sicker and sicker,” Cervantes explained. “As a good parent, she knew something wasn’t right and knew to come see me.”

A few hours later, Cervantes was back at the clinic and going through his regular rotation of patients. Misty Cervantez, 19, came in for prenatal care, six weeks pregnant with her second child. Her first, 2-year-old Eugenio, was delivered by Cervantes and sat in the exam room talking up a storm.

Eulalia Castellon, 74, came to see the doctor for her high blood pressure. She also wanted a flu shot and was complaining of stiffness in her neck.

Although the exam rooms were at capacity and the waiting room was filling up fast, the doctor never hurried. He asked her how things were at home and showed her how to treat her aches and pains.

“I’ve been seeing him for nearly 10 years and he’s a very good doctor,” Castellon said. “He’s very kind and pays attention. He’s also a very good person.”

That response, says Cervantes, is the reason he says he can’t see himself doing anything else.

“At this point I’m very happy with where I’m at,” he said.

“I’m very proud of what we’ve done here at Las Islas and what we’ve been able to do for the community. But I still feel like there’s a lot more to be done, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to do it.”