One night on a lonely stretch of Mexican highway, Dr. Haywood Hall stumbled on a car accident and a man who was unconscious. For 30 minutes Dr. Hall, a vacationing emergency physician, waited for the ambulance to arrive. When it did come, it was with shoddy equipment, expired Valium and an undertrained staff. Although Dr. Hall didn’t have a license to practice medicine in Mexico, he got police permission to help.

The patient survived, but Dr. Hall, who was raised in Mexico, realized the Mexican emergency response team could use some training help. Fourteen years after that car accident on the road to Chihuahua, Dr. Hall has developed a training program that not only trains Mexican emergency physicians but also trains American physicians in language skills.

MedSpanish, the language portion, takes American emergency physicians into San Miguel, Mexico, for three weeks of general language skills (worth up to 50 CME credits). Hall describes it as “general Spanish in a healthcare setting.” MedSpanish provides individualized instruction, matching an instructor with each student for two to three hours of focused teaching per day.

MedSpanish is part of a larger program, called PACE, that trains and certifies 11 percent of Mexican doctors. Because of this, the Mexican government lets MedSpanish students come and learn in their hospitals. The MedSpanish program takes the next “real world” step by sending participants to Mexico where they participate in actual clinical rotations.

Excerpted from: http://www.epmonthly.com/features/current-features/spanish-lessons-in-a-clinical-setting/