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The
IHEC is a consortium of different organizations, programs and activities located in key countries throughout the Americas, which
seeks to provide emergency and primary care training in Spanish to local health care providers in Spanish speaking countries
while providing cultural and Spanish language education for US health care practitioners.
Most physicians in Latin America are General Practitioners (that is, have no graduate medical education).
Specialty training is not the norm in Latin America, even in primary care. Emergency
medicine capacity is severely lacking in Latin America as well. The large number of under-trained
health care providers can be a hazard in itself.
At the same time, US health care practitioners are increasingly
obligated to care for monolingual Spanish speakers in the United States, and must learn how to care for this increasingly
important population.
The IHEC is a fusion of the MedSpanish Program, and the Pan American
Collaborative Emergency Medicine Development Program, which seeks to increase the scope of its training activities in Latin America to include
primary care and public health (all in Spanish). The driving forces which have
increased our scope from emergency medicine to primary care have been as follows:
1) Although a large number of the MedSpanish students initially
came from emergency medicine, an increasing number are in other specialties, or are nurses, P.A.s or other health
care providers.
2) PACEMD Program became the training Center in Mexico for the AAFP's Advanced Life Support for Obstetrics (ALSO course).
3) There has been an infusion into the program of people with
Public Health interests.
4) Emergency Medicine needs to be developed in Latin
America , within the context of Public Health and Primary Care.
5) From our 10 year experience with the MedSpanish and PACEMD
Programs in Guanajuato Mexico, it has become clear that the model of community
based training centers, supported in part by Medical Spanish students from the United
States, is a viable mechanism for dissemination.
The
early stage of Emergency Medicine development focuses on community based short certification courses for practitioners, such
as the Advanced Cardiac Life Support Course, and the Advanced Trauma Life Support course. Our goal is to formalize
community based training centers in Latin America, broaden their scope to include other areas of primary care and public health,
and foster exchanges with US health care personnel, who can benefit from training in cultural aspects of care, including medical
Spanish. The involvement in general and emergency medical education in Latin America is but one of the things that sets
the MedSpanish Program apart from traditional language schools. Although we can provide informal training for those who require
more flexibility, the program aims to meet or exceed AAMC, AAGME and ACCME standards for formal medical training.
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