As she waits out a rain delay during an outdoor shoot, Chris Harlan says that it’s demanding to make a movie — an educational DVD-ROM to be exact — and that the hours are crazy. She’s been on location shoots some nights until 2 a.m. making sure that the scenes accurately portray real-life health-care situations.

Harlan, research instructor in public health nursing, is working with a team of Carolina faculty and staff members to produce ¡A su salud! (To your health!), a multimedia course designed to help health-care professionals and students develop Spanish language skills.

“A number of students and folks in clinical practice would like to speak Spanish in order to be more effective with their patients. Folks in the Latino community are grateful for anyone who is trying to communicate,” Harlan says.

The project began after health educators visited clinic directors who serve Latinos. “Overwhelmingly, the directors told the committee that the best way to help Latinos is to teach students to speak Spanish,” says Claire Lorch, clinical instructor in the Public Health Leadership Program and director of the ¡A su salud! project.

The 95-minute movie, filmed by Wray Media and modeled after Destinos, the popular Spanish-language soap opera produced by McGraw-Hill, centers on a community-based health center founded and staffed for Latinos by Latinos. The characters, played by actors from different Latin American countries, represent a range of racial backgrounds and variants of the Spanish language. Authors of the material, including Julia Cardona Mack, Spanish lecturer in the Department of Romance Languages, are making sure that the language represents the way Spanish speakers naturally speak. ¡A su salud! will also incorporate additional video-based DVD exercises, a workbook, a web site, and an instructor’s manual.