SPAN311

This course is designed to provide students with skills necessary to communicate
with the growing Spanish-speaking community in the United States and abroad.
Conducted entirely in Spanish, Spanish for Health Care Workers will build on the
student’s previous skills in order to develop his/her listening, speaking, writing and
reading skills in Spanish. Specifically, it will focus on how to conduct medical
interviews, obtain the pertinent personal and family history and give specific instructions in Spanish. The course will also address the importance of understanding Hispanic Cultures and ways to build a patient-practitioner relationship. To this end, the course conceives the field of medicine through both a historical as well as an international perspective. Several medical practices will, then, be studied comparatively throughout the ages and around the globe. As with other language courses, by learning Spanish, the student will also gain insight into the nature of his/her own language and culture in a comparative way- particularly, “false cognates” (words and phrases that sound similar to English but have different meanings) relevant to the medical field.