Summary: Cleveland Clinic Lutheran Hospital has introduced a new sleep disorders clinic designed specifically to serve the Hispanic community. The clinic, led by Cinthya Pena Orbea, MD, aims to address the unique sleep health challenges faced by Hispanic patients, including underdiagnosed sleep apnea and the barriers posed by language and cultural differences. The clinic will offer bilingual and bicultural care, with plans to expand services as needed to meet patient demand.
Key Takeaways:
- Culturally Tailored Sleep Care: The new clinic provides patient-centered, bilingual, and bicultural care to address the unique sleep health needs of the Hispanic community.
- Addressing Health Disparities: The clinic aims to overcome barriers such as language differences and social determinants of health that contribute to the underdiagnosis and undertreatment of sleep disorders in Hispanic patients.
- Focus on Sleep Apnea: The clinic will also focus on improving access to CPAP therapy and other sleep apnea treatments for Spanish-speaking patients, aiming to reduce health disparities in this population.
Cleveland Clinic Lutheran Hospital has added a sleep disorders clinic to the programs it offers to meet the unique needs of Hispanic patients in the community.
The new clinic, which is being directed by Cinthya Pena Orbea, MD, will be offered on Wednesdays initially, with more days added as needed to meet patient demand.
More than half of Hispanic people in the United States get less than seven hours of sleep at night, according to a release from Cleveland Clinic. Sleep apnea is widely underdiagnosed, and people who are Hispanic are particularly at risk for that due to structural and psychosocial barriers, even more than members of other minority populations, Pena Orbea says in a release.
Addressing Cultural and Language Barriers
“This will be a unique sleep clinic that will offer patient-centered care that is bilingual as well as bicultural to best meet the Hispanic community,” she says in a release. “About 44% of Hispanic patients report that communication problems from language or cultural differences are a major factor contributing to worse health outcomes than seen in other adults in the United States.”
Optimal sleep health is necessary to promote overall health and prevent chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease, which are all highly prevalent in Hispanic patients, she adds in a release.
Pena Orbea has wanted to start a clinic to better serve the local Hispanic population since she moved to the United States from Ecuador in 2011. She joined Cleveland Clinic’s staff in 2019 after completing a residency in internal medicine at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County Chicago and fellowships in internal medicine and sleep medicine at Mayo Clinic.
Exploring Social Determinants of Health
She is interested in studying how the social determinants of health (access to food, safe housing, health care, and other resources) affect the low rate of patients in this population seeking care for their sleep problems. For example, preliminary data from her work shows that only about 63% of Hispanic patients who are referred for a sleep study by their primary care doctor actually complete such a study.
“I would like to learn from our Hispanic patients more about the barriers that prevent them from getting the care they need so that we can design culturally tailored interventions to address these barriers and promote health equity in this growing population,” she says in a release.
One barrier to treatment is getting equipment and supplies to patients with sleep apnea who need continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy. The new sleep clinic is exploring avenues to best provide that equipment to Spanish-speaking patients.
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