“I find we all feel most comfortable and best heard when we are able to communicate in our native language.” Leo Lapuerta, MD, FACS, applies that view to his own patients, and his practice is set up to act on it.
Dr. Lapuerta, a triple board-certified plastic surgeon with offices in the Houston area, is a native Spanish speaker who is fluent in English. His practice runs a Spanish-language section of its website for patients seeking plastic surgery consultations in Spanish in Houston, and his support staff speak both languages.
A bilingual upbringing
His family immigrated from Valencia, Spain, and he grew up in San Antonio, where his father worked as a pulmonologist. Dr. Lapuerta describes a home with Spanish parents in an American city, and he credits that upbringing with shaping how he relates to patients.
“Growing up in a bilingual home with Spanish parents, in America, provided me a unique cultural perspective as it applies to physician/patient interactions, expectations and the different cultural views of beauty.”
His training ran through English-language institutions: Stanford University, UT Southwestern Medical School, general surgery training at St. John’s Hospital in Detroit and a plastic and reconstructive surgery fellowship at St. Joseph Hospital in Houston. He now serves as Chairman of Plastic Surgery at St. Joseph Hospital and has more than 30 years of experience.
The consultation is where language counts
A cosmetic surgery consultation is dense. It covers medical history, goals, the techniques that fit, the risks every operation carries and the rules for recovery. A patient who is translating in her head while she listens can miss a detail or hold back a question she would ask in her first language.
The practice’s Spanish-language material takes up the concern under a heading that asks, in Spanish, what to do if you don’t speak English. Its answer: the clinics have staff prepared to support patients through the whole process of any procedure in Spanish. That includes Dr. Lapuerta, who can speak with patients without an interpreter in the room.
He frames the benefit as cultural as well as verbal. In his own account, expectations and ideas about beauty differ across cultures, and speaking both languages lets him meet the needs of his English-speaking and Spanish-speaking patients in a way he considers distinct.
Building it into the staff
A surgeon who speaks Spanish covers only part of a patient’s experience. That material describes a process with several consultations and pre-surgical meetings, plus guidance on caring for the body afterward, and much of that contact runs through the office team. The practice promises patients a friendly face and answers that are easy to understand at each step, a promise the staff have to keep in Spanish as well as English.
Dr. Lapuerta says he keeps support staff who are fluent in English and Spanish for that reason. He describes their role as continuity, carrying the benefit he brings to his relationship with patients through the rest of the office.
For any service business, the model translates. Expertise at the top reaches the client only if each handoff below it speaks the client’s language, and the front desk is often the first place a client tests that.
Inside the Spanish-language section
The section lists procedures by their Spanish names, among them abdominoplastia (tummy tuck), blefaroplastia (eyelid surgery), lifting facial (facelift) and liposucción, along with non-surgical treatments such as Botox and chemical peels. It also describes Dr. Lapuerta’s practice of examining each patient from head to toe, so the procedures chosen complement the person as a whole.
Dr. Lapuerta owns and operates a QuadA (AAAASF) accredited outpatient surgical facility, and he works with physician anesthesiologists, never nurse anesthetists or anesthesia assistants.
His view on choosing a surgeon stays the same in English or Spanish: board certification plus experience with the specific procedure, measured in cases and years, is in his view the best determinant of an outcome patients are happy with. In a Spanish-language consultation, a patient can ask the surgeon about both without an interpreter.
This article is for general information only and is not medical advice. Results vary from patient to patient. Consult a board-certified plastic surgeon or your physician about your own situation. Written in partnership with Joseph Lambert, a publicist working with Leo Lapuerta, MD Plastic Surgery.
