Spanish For Health Care Professionals

My wife bought this book for me, and it was a Godsend. Chapter lessons are bite sized and arranged in logical/relational order; interpersonal phrases, cultural issues, admission, discharge, fundamental anatomy, hygiene issues, medication issue, etc. In addition to these categories the book immediately teaches word pronunciation and basic sentence construction...in English sentence format. Perhaps this may sound backwards to a Spanish-speaking listener/patient; however, my message was immediately understood and acknowledged. Bottom line, this book is an excellent jump off point for someone (like me) serving a high volume of Spanish-only speaking patients.

I'm other language challenged but this book makes picking up and using Spanish in my role as an RN easy and effective.

This book is extremely practical for my interactions with spanish-speaking patients. I work at a hospital and we see a large number of Hispanic/Mexican-American individuals. This book has been IMMEDIATELY applicable and helps me to be more effective. Patients appreciate my obvious effort even though my pronunciation and grammer isn't perfect! Thank you to William Harvey for writing a book applicable to ALL types of healthcare professionals, including social workers.

A blurb on the front of William Harvey's _Spanish for Health Care Professionals_ notes that this book is designed for communicating with people whose only language is Spanish. This book is also designed for people who have little or no skills in Spanish to learn something of that language.The first chapter, which is entitled "Basic Information," introduces the reader to the Spanish alphabet, so that the reader may learn how to pronounce Spanish words, and to some basic expressions such as "Good morning" and "How are you?"In subsequent chapters the reader learns the names for the parts of the body, some terms/phrases for admission into a hospital, some terms/phrases for an accident scene, and some terms/phrases for a pregnancy. These chapters are followed by three more which teach terms/phrases according to three hypothetical patients of varied ages. At the end of the book is what the writer called a word/expression finder,an English/Spanish and a Spanish/English dictionary.However the reader should be aware that the terminology discussed is limited in its depth. A quick comparison of this book with _First Responder_ by David Schottke and others shows that terms such as "abdomen" and "anaphylactic shock" are not covered by William Harvey's book. Even so, as the front cover blurb said, this book should be very useful to people who have little or no skills in Spanish when speaking to Spanish speaking patients.