AURORA | Alex Connelly spent his childhood speaking Spanish with his mother, a native Nicaraguan who communicated with her son in her first language.
Even with that background, Connelly found he had gaps in his knowledge when he arrived at the University of Colorado School of Medicine last year as a first-year student. Connelly signed up to be a student leader in the school’s SABES program, an elective course that offers first- and second-year medical students lessons in Spanish. The course offers classes at four levels – sub-zero, beginner, intermediate and advanced – with a common purpose of giving future doctors the tools to communicate more effectively with more patients.
Connelly said he found gaps in his vocabulary as he started teaching students in the beginner group the basics of medical terminology in Spanish earlier this year. Long conversations with his mother, it seemed, hadn’t fully prepped him to ask a patient about basic symptoms or explain simple issues of anatomy.
“Even fluent Spanish speakers wouldn’t be sure of some medical terminology, different body systems and different organ names,” Connelly said. “For me, speaking Spanish all of my life, I never learned the word for ‘liver’ in Spanish, I never had a reason to. All of the Spanish I knew came from speaking with my mother. This gives those types of students a great opportunity to build that medical vocabulary base.”
In 2006, three students from the School of Medicine launched the SABES program as a way to connect future physicians with their eventual patient base. With many medical students planning on practicing in communities across Colorado and elsewhere in the West, learning Spanish seemed an essential tool for doctors looking to better serve and communicate with their patients. This year, about 50 students met once a week for the classes, finding time between their core courses.
“Those students heard from their classmates that they were not able to communicate with Spanish-speaking patients,” said Claire Ojima, a SABES student leader who just wrapped up her second year in the program. “They also had noticed that it wasn’t always easy for clinicians to interact with their Spanish-speaking patients.”
The word “sabes” is a conjugation of the Spanish verb “saber,” “to know,” but the program title is also an acronym. SABES, or Spanish Acquisition Begets Enhanced Service, is an elective course that depends on the organization and energy of its students. With a budget of about $7,000 per year, the SABES lessons are organized and led by students on Fridays during the course of the regular school semester. The program’s capstone event is a clinical activity in the Center for Advancing Professional Excellence, or CAPE, center on the upper floor of one of the campus’ education buildings. The CAPE facilities, normally used to train students with talking robotic mannequins and other simulation tools, becomes a proving ground for the SABES students’ language skills.
“For the end of the year, we have an event where we go upstairs to CAPE and use their clinic rooms. We hire a Spanish-speaking actor and we have them come in … One of them is a Spanish teacher at the University of Denver,” Connelly said. “They act as patients and we’ll have people conduct the interview as if they’re working with an actual patient in the right kind of setting.”
Since third-year medical students have a hectic and demanding schedule on rotation, the SABES program usually involves first- and second-year students and leaders. For Ojima, who has already started her rounds of rotations, said the SABES program was a valuable part of her first two years at the School of Medicine, largely because of her ultimate goal as a doctor.
“The reason I wanted to get into medicine in the first place is I always wanted to work with underserved populations,” Ojima said. “It’s a joy to be able to walk into a room and communicate with a patient in their own language when often, they’re not afforded that luxury.”
Connelly, who will sign up as a student leader again next year, said the program will reach beyond the confines of the campus in the 2012-13 school year. Connelly cited plans to shadow interpreters at the Children’s Hospital Colorado, and to work with students the Aurora Public Schools’ LIGHTS program, an initiative that connects high schoolers with courses rooted in the health sciences.
“We get to practice Spanish with them, and they get to see the medical aspect of things,” Connelly said. “It’s a give-and-take.”
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707