She found her passion in the medical field as a nurse practitioner

Certified family nurse practitioner Fatima Urquilla appreciates her job because it's her passion, and she can help people like her parents, who only speak Spanish. 

Urquilla, 31, was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, and at a very young age, she learned about healthcare because of her father, who has a medical condition related to brain tumors. 

“In El Salvador, we would go to his primary doctor all the time, and there I wasn’t around nurses, only doctors, so I thought I wanted to be a doctor,” she recalled.

At the age of 10, Urquilla and her family moved to the United States, and she continued learning about her father's medical condition in another language. She learned about shunts, neurological red flags, and medical procedures. She also realized that the healthcare system could be very complex to navigate. 

Once in college, she tried a pre-medical program, but it was more difficult and expensive than she expected. Therefore, she looked for options to keep her in the medical field. 

She landed a volunteering job at Venice Family Clinic, which has a large Latino population. That’s when she decided to return to nursing school after finishing her undergrad program.

Urquilla said that to be a nurse practitioner, it takes less than two years, and then you are expected to see 20+ patients. In medical school, you have four years, then three years of residency and then you can see the 20+ patients. 

Joining the workforce in underserved areas

Once she finished the program in 2021, she was accepted into AltaMed’s Nurse Practitioner Fellowship Program. The program addresses health disparities in often-overlooked communities by training compassionate, culturally competent nurse practitioners.

“So the fellowship is like a residency program but for nurse practitioners, and we do almost the exact same work as a family practitioner,” she said. 

Through the program, Urquilla refined her clinical skills and deepened her medical knowledge. She said that through her work, she has learned to help patients find preventive medicine for their conditions and sometimes find illnesses that have no cure, and she still has to let her patients know. 

“In this case is just a follow-up care of do this or do that, it’s more management and monitoring,” she said. 

The AltaMed's Nurse Practitioners fellowship started in 2021 as a result of graduating students from Cal State Los Angeles who felt they needed more training, said Sandra Sanchez, manager of the program.

Eventually, they opened it to all NP graduating students, mainly from Latino backgrounds who can speak English and Spanish. 

“AltaMed is training NPs from these communities also as a way to give back,” said Sanchez. 

Urquilla said she celebrates her job daily, even during National Nurse Practitioner Week. She is very passionate about it, and working in the AltaMed clinics in the southeast area has made her job more valuable, as she speaks Spanish 99% of the time. She can see patients from babies to elderly people, but the median age of her patients is in her 50s. She appreciates this because it truly makes her feel like she’s helping a family member like her dad.

She said that while her childhood dream was to become a doctor, she has learned that the work she does in the outpatient clinic is very similar. She learned not to give up when she couldn’t continue in Medical School and appreciates the alternative.

“If they tell you no, we have to keep searching,” she said. “And I feel that should keep us motivated because we can help culturally because if we are not helping there is not going to be enough cultural representation or Latinos in medicine.”

The National Nurse Practitioner Week is held annually to celebrate these exceptional healthcare providers and to remind lawmakers of the importance of removing outdated barriers to practice so that nurse practitioners will be allowed to practice to the full extent of their experience and education, states the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP).

To learn more about the AltaMed’s Nurse Practitioner Fellowship Program, visit: 

https://www.altamed.org/institute-health-equity#slidein-content-modal-6672