Success comes with commitment, and Doctor Ramón Tallaj is very clear about it, who, despite his busy schedule, received us at his office in the Bronx.
Doctor Tallaj, aware that his community needed him, founded SOMOS Community Care in 2015, a network of clinics focused on low-income families.
“Imagine, 1 million patients, more than 30,000 daily visits, 2,500 doctors, more than 900 places where we provide service, that is SOMOS,” explained Dr. Tallaj.
-You told me that in a month they serve more people than a hospital can.
“Two hospitals together for a year, in one month we see more patients.”
The doctor defines himself as a man of faith. Faith in himself, in people and in God, but that same faith was put to the test, he tells us, when the world changed in 2020 from one day to the next, with the arrival of what would become the Covid-19 epidemic.
The streets of the city completely empty, people dying, people hungry in those most critical moments, was the light of hope, for those he proudly calls “his people.”
“We managed to get machinery moving, and for them to understand that the things that we doctors were doing, with our own resources, working with people who helped us very closely, each of those doctors, in each of the communities, where We opened testing sites, the doctor explained. “But remember that this health crisis brought a humanitarian crisis, people did not have work, they did not have food, so SOMOS gave food, at that same moment the children could not study because there was no way, SOMOS was in the schools doing testing, I am looking for the manner…”.
Since his childhood, Dr. Ramon Tallaj prepared himself for difficult situations, as his destiny was shaped by two events that left a deep mark on his soul.
“Well, actually, I grew up with my father, my grandfather, and my uncle lived with my grandfather, who was a pediatrician, and since I was little I would sit with him and see how he treated people,” the doctor recalls. take care of poor people in a very poor neighborhood, that when it rained the mud took everything away and then at that time one of my relatives, a cousin of mine, about eight years old, got leukemia and I was there and saw when she died, that “It moved me a lot.”
That young man who was often found studying by candlelight in his native Dominican Republic, when he was Vice Minister of Health in the Dominican Republic, the Catholic Church urged him to move to New York to become the light for those neglected Latinos in the city.
“And I arrived here in 1991, I graduated as a doctor specializing in internal medicine and I had to do all my studies for that again here and I opened my offices in Washington Heights and from that date I began to organize doctors.”
Dr. Tallaj admits that living in a world without doctors would be a world devoid of humanity. Therefore, he launched the “Thank You doctor” campaign recently at the Vatican where he attended with more than 200 family doctors, to emphasize the important role they play in our society.
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