Advanced Spanish for Health and Helping Professions

Become a Bilingual and Bicultural Healthcare Professional

Promote health equity and boost your career with a Certificate in Advanced Spanish for the Health and Helping Professions.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), health equity is achieved “when every person has the opportunity to attain his or her full health potential and no one is disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances.”

Understanding that communication is one of the keys to advancing health equity in our society, St. Edward's created the Certificate in Advanced Spanish for the Health and Helping Professions to help meet the need in the healthcare sector for bilingual and bicultural professionals.

Program Benefits

This program allows you to earn certification while pursuing your undergraduate degree. You’ll leverage your skills as a bilingual speaker or advanced second-language learner of Spanish. And you’ll be prepared for health-related professions that require specific, technical vocabulary and cultural knowledge.

The methodology of this program will be grounded in an inquiry-based approach, employ best practices from translation studies, as well as refine your written and spoken Spanish. The certificate provides an experiential learning component (internship) in the area of your major.

The certificate is designed for students with advanced oral proficiency — Spanish/English bilinguals and second-language learners.

What will you learn?

The linguistic and cultural competencies addressed in the certificate will position you to become a leader in the health and helping professions as an advocate for the Latino/Latinx population in the United States. Learning outcomes include:

• Developing interpersonal communication skills in Spanish focused on in-person encounters and interviews in a clinical or medical setting.
• Demonstrating cultural knowledge of the Latinx sociocultural context through research and experiential learning.
• Applying the fundamentals of translation and interpretation necessary in healthcare settings.
• Refining and professionalizing oral presentational skills in Spanish in order to communicate in a caring and effective manner.