Essential Emergency Medicine Spanish

Course Overview:

Essential Emergency Medicine Spanish is a self-paced, online course that will prepare you to confidently perform a complete H&P and discuss testing, treatment, and disposition in Spanish for common patient scenarios encountered in emergency medicine.

Upon completion of the “Essential Emergency Medicine Spanish” course, participants will be able to:

• Complete a medical history and physical exam, and discuss testing, treatment, an disposition with Spanish-speaking patients who present to the ED (or another medical setting) with common and fairly straight-forward clinical presentations.
• Expedite communication with Spanish-speaking patients and their families, and therefore reduce potentially-harmful delays in care.
• Increase familiarity with differential diagnoses for common emergency medicine chief complaints.
• Learn anatomical terms in Spanish that are related to common emergency medicine chief complaints.
• Improve the consistency with which they use layman’s terminology when speaking to patients in both English and Spanish.

Course Mentor / Contributors:

Benjamin Tanner, PA-C -- Course Director. Benjamin has been practicing emergency medicine in Las Vegas since early 2014, and also has experience working in primary care and urgent care settings. He has been certified to treat Spanish-speaking patients in the ED without an interpreter and has done so routinely throughout his career. As the principal author of this course, he drew upon his Spanish-language fluency in addition to ample experience as a provider in the ED.

Carmen Vega, Certified Medical Interpreter. Carmen has been working as a Spanish interpreter with hospital patients, including those in the emergency room, for several years. Carmen reviewed selected phrases in the course content to help refine the terminology from the perspective of a native speaker and medical interpreter.

Course Outline:

Lesson 1: Introduction

Lesson 1 explains how the course is organized and the rationale behind what is included in the course, while also providing suggestions on how to take full advantage of course materials.

Lesson 2: Spanish Language Basics

Lesson 2 teaches the fundamentals of the Spanish language, including basic grammar, common vocabulary words, numbers, time (telling time, days, months...), terms to clarify patient responses, and rules of pronunciation.

Lesson 3: Abdominal Pain

In lesson 3 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room with abdominal pain.  This lesson and the next several lessons (through “Stroke”) also cover relevant anatomy, differential diagnosis, and other bonus topics. 

Lesson 4: Chest Pain

In lesson 4 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room with chest pain.

Lesson 5: Shortness of Breath

In lesson 5 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room with shortness of breath.

Lesson 6: Fever

In lesson 6 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room with a fever.

Lesson 7: Cough / URI

In lesson 7 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room with a cough or other URI symptoms.

Lesson 8: Laceration

In lesson 8 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room with a laceration, as well as phrases to use while suturing.

Lesson 9: Trauma / MVA (motor vehicle accident)

In lesson 9 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room after an MVA or other trauma.

Lesson 10: Back Pain

In lesson 10 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room with back pain.

Lesson 11: Headache

In lesson 11 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room with a headache.

Lesson 12: Leg Pain / Joint Pain

In lesson 12 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room with joint pain or leg pain.

Lesson 13: Stroke

In lesson 13 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room with potential stroke symptoms.

Lesson 14: Cardiac Arrhythmia / Arrest

In lesson 14 you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to do an H&P and discuss testing and treatment for a patient presenting to the emergency room with a cardiac arrhythmia or cardiac arrest.

Lesson 15: Review of Systems

In lesson 15, you’ll learn the precise phrases needed to perform a more in-depth medical history for any or all of the common body systems. 

Lesson 16: Deposition

In lesson 16, you’ll learn the specific phrases needed to explain the plan for “disposition” (i.e. where the patient is going from here and what happens next). 

All necessary course materials are included.

System Requirements:

• Cable and DSL internet connections are recommended for the best experience.

• CPU: 1 GHz or higher
• RAM: 2 GB or higher
• Resolution: 1280 x 720 or higher
• Speakers / Headphones
• Microphone (Webinar / Live Online sessions)

• Microsoft Windows 7 or 10 (Home, Pro)
• Mac OSX 10 or higher.
• Latest Chrome OS
• Latest Linux Distributions

NOTE: While we understand that our courses can be viewed on Android and iPhone devices, we do not recommend the use of these devices for our courses. The size of these devices do not provide a good learning environment for students taking online or live online based courses.

• Latest Google Chrome is recommended for the best experience.
• Latest Mozilla FireFox
• Latest Microsoft Edge
• Latest Apple Safari

• Office suite software (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice)
• PDF reader program (Adobe Reader, FoxIt)
• Courses may require other software that is denoted in the above course outline.