Developing a course to teach Spanish for health care professionals.

To make the baccalaureate nursing curriculum more responsive to changing U.S. demographics, the School of Nursing at The University of Texas at Austin instituted a required course, titled Spanish for Health Care Professionals. This course, developed in collaboration with the University's Department of Spanish and Portuguese, focuses on conversational Spanish using the communicative language teaching approach, rather than grammar and medical terminology instruction. Class activities, along with course materials, are linked to nursing practice. Course assignments are designed to develop authentic communication in reading, writing, listening, speaking, and understanding culture, and students demonstrated oral and written linguistic gains in relation to their Spanish fluency and accuracy. Because the Hispanic population is now the largest minority group in the United States, this course will help nurses communicate with Spanish-speaking patients.

Touchpoints: changing the face of pediatric nurse practitioner education.

Touchpoints is an interdisciplinary relational model of healthcare primarily used with parents and young children. The underlying premise of the Touchpoints approach is to support the parent/child relationship during the health encounter by enhancing parents' efforts to optimize their child's physical and psychological development. Nurse practitioners who use this approach in practice find they are able to connect quickly to the parents' most urgent concerns for their child. Our experience has been that a pediatric nurse practitioner program that uses Touchpoints as the underlying framework can assist students in achieving a holistic view of families by focusing the curriculum more directly on development and relationships. Students learn that building a relationship with parents, and joining them in the care of their child, produces an atmosphere in the health encounter of mutual respect and trust. Parents leave the encounter feeling satisfied their concern for their child has been heard and questions have been seriously discussed; students leave feeling competent and valued by their patients. Touchpoints provides a model for teaching and demonstrating the development of interpersonal relationships by using the language of the child's behavior.