Sidebar: HEO's Priorities For Action
Some HHS Hispanic workers laud the agenda as a step-initiated from the highest administrative levels-to improve Hispanic employee relations in the department as well as the department's relations with its Hispanic "customers," or people who use HHS services. Others, however, view the document-and the remedies it prescribes-with a jaundiced eye. They base that skepticism on what they say is HHS's 20-year history of studying problems facing the department's Hispanic work force, then ignoring the studies.
The change from consensus to action "has not happened," declares Maria Domitilla Segarra, director of the office of minority health concerns at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) in Rockville, Md. Segarra, a member of the Department Working Group on Hispanic Issues, which wrote the agenda, continues, "The bottom line is, all of this stuff is disparate; there is no focal point, no staff group, nobody to ...
