News Release

School of Medicine launches four-year
curriculum in medical Spanish

By TOM HUGHES
UNC School of Medicine

CHAPEL HILL -- During the week beginning Oct. 18, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill medical students will work with community physicians as part of a new four-year curriculum in medical Spanish.

Twenty-three incoming first-year medical students were selected for participation in the program; the students already speak Spanish at least at the intermediate level.

Historically, all UNC medical students spend five weeks in community-based practices and clinics statewide during their first and second years. Community week gives many their first experiences in the real world of medicine, with opportunities to practice basics such as taking histories, performing physicals and counseling patients under the supervision of a community physician.

What is new is that this particular group of students will be doing the same thing with the added twist of speaking Spanish, said Dr. Dan Reuland, an associate professor in the department of medicine. Students will use Spanish at least some of the time because they’ll be assigned to work with physicians who treat large numbers of Spanish-speaking patients.

The new program is called the Comprehensive Advanced Medical Program of Spanish, or CAMPOS. The program is funded by a $125,000 grant from The Duke Endowment that was announced this past June. The endowment intends to award an additional $300,000 for the program over the next three years.

Faculty in UNC’s departments of medicine and family medicine developed the program in response to the rapidly increasing numbers of immigrants to North Carolina from Spanish-speaking counties; the majority of these new residents are from Mexico. Providing quality health care to this segment of the population is challenging due to the differences in language and culture between Mexico and the United States, said Reuland, who led efforts to create the CAMPOS program.

The need for more bilingual health-care providers in North Carolina is acute, he added. "As a flagship medical school for the state, we need to be sure we are doing what we can to increase the numbers of medical school graduates who can care for Spanish-speaking patients independently – without relying on interpreters. We have very few native Spanish speakers applying to medical school here. Fortunately, we do have a sizable group of students who arrive having already studied the language pretty extensively.

"If we help offer them the right training, such as making sure they know health-related aspects of the Spanish language, we believe they can become quite competent in the language."

Other faculty involved in creating and running the program are Dr. Marco Aleman, an associate professor in the department of medicine; and Drs. Beat Steiner and Pam Frasier, both associate professors in the department of family medicine.

Each year, a group of about 20 students will be recruited for CAMPOS from the first-year class. Incoming students who report that they are intermediate-to-advanced Spanish speakers are asked to apply for CAMPOS. Students then complete an application and take an oral fluency assessment as part of the application process.

The CAMPOS program in medical Spanish runs concurrently with the rest of the medical school curriculum. In addition to the hands-on work learning during community weeks, the program offers other modes of learning, including classroom courses such as the "Medical Spanish and Culture." This course will employ mock or "standardized" patients as well as multi-media interactive exercises from a new distance education program, ¡A su salud!, also developed at UNC.

Students also will participate in community service activities and in an international immersion program in a Latin American country, where they will live with a family and work on a health-related project.

In their final year, CAMPOS students will undergo a live "authentic" assessment using standardized patients to evaluate their proficiency in medical Spanish.

The program began in July, when the first class was recruited. The initial Duke Endowment funding is expected to keep the program running through July 2008.

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Note: Community week offers many good photo, video and interview opportunities for media representatives. For assistance in setting up interviews, contact Stephanie Crayton at (919) 966-2860 or scrayton@unch.unc.edu.