Faculty-Led Global Health Rotations
International rotations for health-professions students in Costa Rica and Ecuador, built around Spanish, community health, and an ethical framework for working abroad.
This is the program we were built to run. Our rotations combine Spanish immersion, community health, and global health into a single experience, delivered through an interprofessional education model and supported by local partnerships that predate any given student group.
What a Rotation Involves
A typical rotation week combines Spanish instruction, roughly 20 hours across the week, with medical outreach work Tuesday through Thursday alongside local partner organizations. Students live with host families, one student per household, which keeps them speaking Spanish outside class hours.
The clinical and community work is real. Students participate in health education and outreach in underserved communities, work supervised by local physicians, and observe how care is delivered in a system with different resources and different constraints than the one they trained in. The health conditions they encounter, elevated blood sugar, elevated blood pressure, malnutrition, are the conditions those communities actually live with.
The Disciplines We Serve
Current rotations are open to APN, DO, DPT, MD, MPH, PA, PharmD, and RN students.
Medical, Nursing, PA & NP Rotations
Run in February and July, as three and four week programs within a four week block.
PharmD APPE Rotations
Run June through July and August, as five and six week programs within a six week block, and include shadowing a local pharmacist.
Public Health Practicum Placements
Run in February and July, as three and four week programs within a four week block.
The Interprofessional Model
Students from different health disciplines rotate together and work on the same community health projects. A medical student, a pharmacy student, and a nursing student end up on common goals with a shared constraint, all of them working in a second language.
That constraint is useful. It flattens the usual hierarchy, because everyone is operating at the edge of their Spanish rather than the edge of their clinical training. Faculty consistently tell us it produces a kind of interprofessional collaboration that is hard to manufacture on a home campus.
Spanish Without a Prerequisite
There is no Spanish minimum for participation. Instruction is set to each student’s level, which means the rotation is open to your whole cohort rather than only the students who took Spanish as undergraduates.
For students working toward medical Spanish certification, the rotation is structured preparation for it.
The Ethics, Which We Treat as Core Curriculum
Short-term international health work can do harm. Faculty who have been in this field a while know it, and it is usually the first thing a thoughtful program director asks about. Our position is that students should leave with an ethical framework rather than a set of photographs. That means:
We support existing projects
We partner with local organizations to support community health work that was already underway and will continue after the students leave. We do not design interventions around a student calendar.
Continuity of care is the standard
Students learn to think about what happens to the patient when the visiting team is gone, and to evaluate international work by that measure.
Cultural humility is taught, not assumed
Students encounter Latin American health beliefs, norms, and practices directly, including values their own upbringing may not share, and are asked to work within them rather than around them.
Resource-limited care is understood rather than pitied
The point is to appreciate the complexity of delivering good care with constrained resources, which is a skill that transfers directly to underserved populations at home.
We publish our guiding principles for international medical work, and we are happy to walk your faculty through them before you commit a cohort.
How This Differs From a General Study Abroad Program
A general provider can arrange housing, language classes, and excursions. What they usually cannot arrange is the part that matters here: standing relationships with local health organizations, placements supervised by local physicians, an interprofessional cohort, CME and CE accreditation, and program leaders who know what a health-professions student is supposed to get out of the experience.
Those relationships took years to build and they are the reason our rotations run on a fixed annual calendar rather than being assembled per group.
Supervision and support
Program leaders provide 24/7 leadership, coordination, and support in country, with daily on-site mentorship and supervision. Students are not dropped into a placement and checked on weekly. Full detail is on the risk management and student safety page.
Accreditation
Our medical Spanish immersion programs are CME and CE accredited. For institutions, that means the academic content has been through external review, which tends to shorten the internal approval conversation.
Institutions Already Sending Students
We run rotations for the University of Colorado Schools of Medicine and Pharmacy, the University of Nevada Reno School of Medicine, and Regis University, and classes for the University of Central Florida School of Medicine. We are glad to connect you with any of them before you commit a cohort.
Bringing Your Own Cohort
You can send students into an existing rotation, or we can build a custom faculty-led program around your course with your faculty member leading it. Both work. Which one is right depends on your numbers, your calendar, and how much academic control you need.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Tell us the discipline, your numbers, and the term you are targeting.
See all of our programs for institutions.
