opening up nursing the profession to spanish speakers?

[brown rice]

I just posted a thread called, " Is there cultural diversity in the nursing profession?" and on a similar topic I would like to put out another question. I am a C.N.A. and have noticed that maybe as much as 50% of my co-workers are Hispanic, yet I personally have not seen the among nurses. I have two women friends from Guatemala who are very good C.N.A.'s, but desperately want to go into nursing. They both feel it is impossible due to their language skills. Yet, both these women are able to communicate just fine, though would probably run into trouble with some of the medical terminology.

There is an ever growing demand for spanish speaking nurses. It seems logical to me that the nursing profession would want to recruit hispanics to fill this need. How can the profession become more accessible to Hispanic people? Is it essentail that english skills be perfect and how could nursing programs adapt to help with the language barrier? are there any other important pieces to these problem that I have not considered?

[VictoriaG]

Wow, this topic sure got us all stirred up! IMHO, communication and the art thereof, is the most important talent and responsibility of a good nurse. All day long, every day we work, we are expected to communicate effectively to doctors, to patients and their families, to co-workers, to management. To those of us who have been nurses many years, honest and concise commmunication has become knee-jerk. In this place and time, in this glorious country, English is how we communicate.

Enough said.