CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas —
There are over 300,000 pharmacists in the United States and even though Hispanics are the largest minority group in the country, they still only make up about five percent of that pharmacist population.
When seeking medical advice, having a professional who understands and relates to a patient's culture can often make all the difference.
Over at the Irma Lerma Rangel School of Pharmacy in Kingsville, Director of Recruitment and associate professor Dr. Juan J. Bustamante knows a thing or two about the importance of mentoring the students.
“It makes a big difference when you have that mentoring and talking to people, and meeting the right people at the right time and really showing them what they can actually do and what they can actually be. Then you can give them a dream. That’s a big thing that drives me," Bustamante said.
As a child, going to college was never in the books for Bustamante. He watched most of his older friends go and follow their fathers into the oil fields.
That changed for Bustamante when, as a child, he saw his mother drive 50 miles every day from his home in Zapata to Laredo to earn her teaching certificate and later earn her counseling degree at Texas A&M-Kingsville.
“All you gotta do is change one life in a family. You change one life in a family, then what happens is you can change that family tree," he said.
Now, Bustamante is doing just that as he helps dozens of first-generation college students from all backgrounds pursue their dreams of becoming pharmacists.
He remembers the moment he finally realized just how important he was to students that had backgrounds similar to his.
“I was working with the endocrine society, and they had these events where they would bring in underrepresented minorities. In this group there was only two Hispanic women, and these are high school students, he said."
The girls tracked him down after the event and started asking him questions about his career when they told him something that would make him realize the true impact.
"They started asking me lots of questions and I was just kind of curious and they said, ‘You know you’re the first person I've ever seen that looked like me that has a PhD.’ That changed everything," he said.
Regional Health Care Director for Walgreens Rick Fernandez says that having someone you can relate to isn’t only important in mentorship. It carries on into pharmacy practice.
“For the patients to understand that the person across the counter in the pharmacy can relate to what they're talking about is as simple as even sharing language together or even understanding the culture, he said.
"You don’t know how many times where someone asked me if I speak Spanish and the lights when up in their eyes when I would say ‘Yeah, dígame por favor!',”
Bustamante says that identifying with your pharmacists forms a different level of trust that can positively affect a patient’s experience.
“So, if you have someone that looks like you on the other side, you’re kind of like, ‘Okay, they look like me.’ Then you build up this trust. Then if you can speak and be bilingual and speak in the same language, you’ll build more trust and so the care of that patient goes up,” he said.
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