Designs and delivers personalised English language courses for individuals and for groups of professionals.

Overseas Nurses – Addressing the Challenge

The National Health Service is a distinctive feature of British culture and is something we in the UK have either direct or indirect experience of. Its difficulties bounce forever back and forth between politicians, but for every criticism we hear there is usually a more than re-balancing anecdote about a medical success which has been achieved in the face of adversity.

I have already written about my teaching work with Worcestershire Acute Hospitals Trust. Since then the recruitment of overseas nurses has become a necessity for many NHS hospitals around the country. A strategy to round-off the technical skills of these new nurses with English language training which teaches both the language of the NHS (such as the thousands of acronyms and documents) as well as the accompanying situation-based language (such as idioms, local dialects and functional language) is gaining pace.

I appreciate that some readers of this post will view its content as self-promotion and I would be lying if I deny this completely. I have decided to upload this post because I also feel a huge sense of responsibility and drive to improve upon what I have already done. Hospitals I am working with now and those I will be working with in the future need their new nurses to integrate and contribute quickly and professionally. The challenge for all involved is substantial, but achievable.

In spring of this year I had a minor medical problem in my abdomen which intermittently gave me debilitating pain. On two separate occasions at two different hospitals I was treated superbly by NHS paramedics, doctors and hospital nurses. I now use these experiences as notional benchmarks for the expectations of patients and hospital managers alike and it underpins my NHS teaching work substantially.

Posted October 13th, 2014 In Blog, Homepage

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