Education and celebration for Hispanic Heritage Month

La población hispana de Estados Unidos es 59.9 millones desde la fecha del 1 de julio de 2018, lo cual hace de las personas de origen hispano la mayor minoría étnica o racial del país. Los hispanos constituían el 18.3% de la población total del país.

If you can’t read that, you know what it is like for many pharmacy patients and prospective patients. Pharmacists need to be prepared to reach these audiences to make the highest impact. The MUSC College of Pharmacy celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month with a luncheon teaching students, faculty members, and staff about ways to connect with their Hispanic patients, which makes for good health care, good business, and good sense.

Proposed by students on the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, the luncheon held Sept. 30 featured Carlos Ortiz ’20. Ortiz grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador before moving to Atlanta at age 18. A talented soccer player, he went to undergraduate school on a soccer scholarship and subsequently coached at many levels, from elementary to college. After moving to Charleston in 2010 with his wife, Katie, Ortiz worked as a pharmacy technician, first for CVS and then at MUSC in each of the outpatient pharmacies. He was accepted into the MUSC College of Pharmacy in 2014. 

Rotations in Barcelona and with James Sterrett at Fetter helped hone his skills at cross-cultural communication. A certified health care translator, he provided students and faculty at the luncheon strategies, insights, and phrases in Spanish to help them communicate more effectively with Hispanic patients.

According to Ortiz, Hispanic patients:

• Communicate a lot with their hands, so use non-verbal as well as verbal communication.
• Tend to be quiet and reserved in public places, so it might be important to seek their questions rather than await them.
• Open up more to speakers using “usted” rather than the less formal “tu” since it indicates respect and propriety.

The interactive session offered an informative and practical way for participants to celebrate the Hispanic culture every day, making the celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month the foundation for a lifetime of appreciation.