Faculty Spotlight: Betsy Sleath — Health-Care Use by Latinos
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Faculty Spotlight: Betsy Sleath — Health-Care Use by Latinos
Health-Care Use by Latinos
Sleath has always had a passion for Latino culture. She got a heavy dose of it when she spent two years as a professor at the University of New Mexico before coming to UNC-Chapel Hill, and she still takes a trip to New Mexico every year.
That interest is reflected in her work as well. One of Sleath’s research interests is racial and ethnic disparities in health-care use, and she is finishing up a study that looks at ways to improve pharmacy services for Latinos in North Carolina.
“Latino health care is an important issue that I think we need to study more, especially in our state, where the Latino population has grown a lot,” she says.
“Our whole idea with that study is how we can improve pharmacy services for Latinos, especially those that may not be fluent in English.”
Sleath says patient illiteracy is a problem she has encountered in the U.S. and abroad, and she says it is an issue people aren’t always aware of.
“I use this example with my students: When I was in a Subway trying to get a sandwich, this woman asked the Subway workers what was on a certain kind of sandwich, and they said to her very rudely, ‘It’s up there on the sign,’ ” Sleath says.
“After she left, I said to them, ‘What if she couldn’t read the sign?’ I don’t think we think about that. And my collaborators in Greece and India said the same thing, that illiteracy is a huge problem.”
According to the National Institute for Literacy, more than twenty percent of adults in the U.S. read at or below a fifth grade level.
“That’s a high number,” Sleath says. “One out of five individuals might have difficulty reading a prescription bottle or those leaflets with the tiny print that they sometimes give you. We need to do something.”
Researchers in the project, which received a pilot grant from the UNC Program on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health Outcomes, interviewed 93 Latinos from Orange, Alamance, and Chatham Counties about their use of pharmacies.
“We interviewed Latino individuals from all over,” Sleath says. “We recruited them at pharmacies. We recruited them through the Orange County Healthy Start. We even got a table at a flea market in Mebane, where a lot of Latinos go. We really were trying to get Latinos that were and were not using pharmacies.
“We also asked Latino patients if they bought medicine in their home countries and if they buy them at the tiendas or the Mexican grocery stores. The North Carolina Department of Agriculture is concerned that some of these grocery stores are selling medication from other countries because there’s a danger in that.”