Dr. Helen Tarp 

Spanish for the Health Professions

By E.E. Curtis

The Program

I was doing medical interpretation and translation. I thought I bet there’s a lot of students who would like to do this. This is a very useful skill. We did independent classes and they filled. Students were very enthusiastic.

I was on the Curriculum Council and I met someone from the physician assistant program. And I was thinking how can I bring Spanish in and show how it is useful to the university’s healthcare mission? That’s when I really started developing the Spanish for Health Professions. 

That’s when the undergraduate baccalaureate degree in Spanish for the Health Professions came to be. I designed the graduate certificate which is only 15 credits. I wanted to help the Spanish program grow and flourish and one of the ways to do that is to offer students the opportunity to study language in a way that makes sense to them.

You don’t have to be in a medical profession to get the BA in Spanish for Health Professions. We designed the degree so it would dovetail really nicely with any number of majors at the university.

We’ve had several students who have gone to medical school. We’ve got some that are going to dental school, one who’s in counseling now. 

Our Spanish for Health Professions really focuses on rural health. We talk a lot about rural, rural Latinx, health disparities, barriers to healthcare. The students who are interviewing for PA or medical are very well-informed about the issue of rural health and they can speak Spanish. It’s a highly desirable attribute. 

Some of the students have used the program as an impetus to start their own projects. We had one student [Adolfo Andazola] who took two groups of students to Puerto Rico. He organized the trip himself to clean up after the hurricane. He’s organizing a trip to an orphanage in Mexico. His dream is to start his own clinic back in Carey Idaho. That’s where he’s from. 

High School Outreach

We got a grant taking the Spanish for Health Professions program into the high schools. It was a pipeline program trying to encourage rural students, especially rural Latinx students, to go into health professions. We were able to expose those kids to a lot of different careers: nursing, physical therapy, public health, physician assistant, pre-med. 

We’ve had so many of the high school students who didn’t see themselves as a healthcare professional. By the end of the class they said, hey I think I’m gonna be a nurse, or go pre-PA. I want to be a physician assistant.

A lot of our masters students are teachers. I’m hoping they might say, hey maybe at my school I’ll get a class of medical Spanish. I could do this with my high school kids. I bet they’d like that. 

Maybe we can get more of these programs in different parts of the country. And then it just continues to grow and expand.

Career Opportunities

So much of our lives depends on the ability to communicate. If your baby’s sick you call 9-1-1. But what if you can’t call 9-1-1? We take it for granted right? People don’t think about the need for interpreters until they don’t have them.

We get calls all the time from different employers saying, hey we’d really like to take someone in. Could you let your students know we’d like to hire them? There’s a need pretty much everywhere. 

We did a class through Workforce Development for one of the potato plants up in Blackfoot. It was all  their management. They wanted Spanish classes so they could speak to their employees. 

We try to make sure all our students have the opportunity to have some kind of professional development. Our goal is to help them be more hireable, more competitive in the market. 

These kinds of certifications are very important for people, especially in Idaho, trying to get into different parts of the workforce. 

How do you stay in Idaho? Well health professions jobs are jobs that you don’t have to move out of the state for. You can stay in Idaho and get a good job and support your family and have a rewarding career. 

The Spanish for Health Professions program gives students a lot of opportunities. It’s very rich. We provide and find internships for them. They learn how to be interpreter-translators. They learn about health issues among vulnerable populations, and we provide projects for them so they can gain valuable service research experience.

We are very pleased to be able to work with the Pocatello Free Clinic. The Pocatello Free Clinic gets trained interpreters and our students get a very rich experience. We can support them as they try to serve our more vulnerable community members. 

Latinx Students

I grew up speaking English, but that doesn’t mean I spoke it or wrote it well enough to do anything with it professionally. The opportunity to take your skills and improve to the level of what we would call professional is always a great opportunity.

Before we got the Spanish for Health Professions we had maybe 5% of the students in the Spanish program who were Latinx. Now it’s about 50%. We’ve had a great response among Spanish-speaking Latinx students. 

A lot of times they don’t study Spanish because they speak it, but the medical aspect of it is attractive to them. The Spanish for Health Professions has attracted more Latinx youth into our college programs and they seem to enjoy it. 

One time we had this girl and she said, I didn’t know that speaking Spanish was a good thing. She comes from a Latinx background and it was kind of sad. But she realized, we told her, you have something that is a marketable skill. Whether you go into medicine, business, insurance, law, or agriculture. Not only is it a marketable skill, but it’s a service. You can be a very big help. You can be a facilitator. 

Speaking a language, especially if it is your home language can be very helpful in the healthcare field. The Spanish for Health Professions has provided a nice vehicle for students whose goal is to become an MD, DO, or PA, or in nursing. 

Community Outreach

My students, sure they benefit. Sure, this is something that’s going to look good on their CV. But I wanna make sure that they understand the people that they’re helping, they’re not incidental. They are the reason.

In our programs we do service and research in a community. We do a lot of bilingual education. We find health disparities or health issues. We investigate and find out what the roots of the disparity are according to the data. Then we usually do some kind of educational program that we deliver in the community. 

When we do educational programming on cervical cancer it’s because we want people to be healthier. We don’t want someone’s aunt or sister or mother dying because their English isn’t so great. 

It’s all about the people for me. It’s all about service. Take what you know and use it to help another person. There’s no reason for someone to suffer, which oftentimes in health people do suffer. They suffer in silence. 

We used to do these nighttime clinics for women up in Power County, all volunteers. There was no one there who spoke Spanish at that time. There were women that had very painful, horrible pelvic inflammatory disease and some of them were very, very, very sick. And just because we were able to go there and have an interpreter, those women and their suffering was alleviated.

Just being able to say that woman who had that illness she’s okay now. Her baby’s okay. People are gonna be okay as we work together. I’d like the kids to have that feeling. They go in their lab classes all day long and then they come in our classes and it reminds them why they're spending all those hours in the lab-- because they want to help people.

I remember one of my first students when I first started doing this, he was on-call and he interpreted for a woman in childbirth. She named her baby after him. 

Little ripples like that you know. Little ripples of people being helped and pleasant memories.