Spanish For Healthcare Professionals, or SPAN-047, is a new three-unit course created last fall, and scheduled to start this summer. The purpose of the course will be to help medical students learn to better communicate with Spanish-speaking patients and their families.

The new course is a collaborative effort between the Spanish and Nursing departments in an attempt to meet the needs of future nursing students.

The course will be an important addition to the curriculum as LMC nursing students will ideally work in the local area and Spanish is one of the most spoken languages.

The course will be taught by Spanish professor Victor Coronado, who spearheaded the effort.

“I have not taught a class like this before,” said Coronado, “But I will be working with other colleagues and with Sharon Goldfarb, nursing dean, to find the best way to teach this class and make it a successful one for our students.”

According to Coronado, the course will cover oral language proficiency, grammar and idiomatic expressions and culture as well as various study and practice language skills needed for communicating with patients.

In addition, this course will teach basic pronunciation and intonation skills in Spanish, courtesy expressions such as greetings and departures, how to formulate questions and learn to give appropriate responses, learning specialized vocabulary related to hospital equipment and healthcare practices, learn and identify vocabulary related to food and nutrition, as well as translate pharmaceutical terms from English to Spanish.