ICML 9

9º World Congress on Health Information and Libraries

Salvador, Bahia - Brazil, September, 20 to 23 - 2005

BVS4

4th Regional Coordination Meeting of the VHL

September, 19 to 20 - 2005

Spanish language knowledge of Colombian health professionals

Participants:
Objective. To determine the knowledge and use of proper Spanish grammar and spelling skills of Colombian health professionals.

Methodology. Participants in continuous education scientific writing workshops took a baseline test at the beginning of the seminar with 79 questions (36 for spelling, 7 queísmo/dequeísmo examples, 18 phrases for punctuation, and 18 multiple choice sentences for grammar knowledge). The purpose was to detect weak areas of general language use to be reinforced during the workshop. The 40-hour seminar was taught in three research institutions to foster their original publications and in two postgraduate programs in epidemiology.

Results. 64 health professional, 20 males and 44 females, took the seminar. Attendant university degrees were: 42 physicians, 11 laboratory clinicians, 4 biologists, 2 microbiologists, 2 chemistry and biology teachers, and 1 nurse, 1 sociologist y 1 dietitian; 37 had completed postgraduate training and 14 were currently registered in one. Two people (3%) had 5 publications (articles, book chapters, brochures, editorial coordinators of books); 3 (5%), 4 publications; 7 (11%), 3 publications; 13 (20%), 2 publications; 9 (14%), one publication, and 30 (47%) had never published.

The average number of correct answers was: spelling, 21 (61%) (range: 7-33); queísmo/dequeísmo, 4 (71%) (range: 1-7); punctuation, 9 (50%) (range: 0-14), and common sentences, 10 (56%) (range: 4-17). Physicians obtained the highest scores: spelling, 23 (64%) (range: 7-33); queísmo/dequeísmo 5 (71%) (range: 2-7); punctuation, 10 (56%) (range: 4-14); and, common sentences, 11 (61%) (range: 6-16).

Conclusions. The results are overwhelming since they show the great lack of knowledge -and the misuse- of Spanish grammar and spelling rules by Colombian health professionals. Neither the university curricula nor the working place offered any type of scientific writing basic skill course; those who had published have had the benefit of a me ntor or research group pressure to communicate their results.

English biomedical literature surpasses greatly the Spanish written scientific literature. Consequently, health personnel read more articles in English than in Spanish. This could explain the abuse of neologisms, and the lack of interest of researchers and teachers to look for the most appropriate term for the concept being expressed.

This communication pretends to call for the need to organize scientific writing courses that may fulfill this great void, which may improve the number of worthy local publications in world literature.