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Our Mission

EALTHY’s mission is to improve the design and delivery of English for Healthcare courses wherever they take place.
To achieve this, we do the following:

  • support the professional development of those involved in teaching, researching and writing content for English for Healthcare;
  • enhance the quality of both the teaching and learning of English for Healthcare through developing shareable resources and expertise; and
  • promote and disseminate understanding of English for Healthcare through events, webinars and networking.

Our Members Resources have a growing bank of downloadable lesson plans, worksheets, articles, OET and exam preparation support, professional development ideas and videos – all included as part of the membership.

We host regular professional development webinars, given by leading experts in English for Healthcare, including writers, lecturers and academic leaders. All webinars are recorded and hosted in the Members Resources.

We arrange free access to the Communication & Medicine journal and discounts for members to expert third party publications and courses.

Finally, we organise the bi-annual English for Healthcare Conference, a unique two-day international conference which attracts presenters and delegates from across the world. Presentations include a wide variety of practical and research-based sessions.

Meet some of the people behind EALTHY

The EALTHY Executive Board is currently made up of the President and four officers, headed by the Director. These board members, responsible for the day-to-day running of the association, are joined by two Clinical advisors and Regional representatives. Regional representatives are responsible for promoting EALTHY in their country or region. Board members are united in promoting the fundamental importance of effective communication in healthcare.

If you are a current EALTHY member and would like to support the work of the EALTHY Board as a volunteer, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d be glad to hear from you.

Professor John Skelton
President read more
Catherine Richards Golini, PhD
Founder and Board Member read more
Louise Atkinson
Board Member read more
Petra Zrníková, PhD
Membership Secretary read more
Virginia Allum
Head of Resources read more
Chris Moore
Director and Board Member read more
Bethan Edwards
Head of Professional Development read more
Professor John Skelton
President

John Skelton is a graduate in English Literature, and in Applied Linguistics. He taught English as a Foreign/Additional Language (EFL/EAL), and Applied Linguistics for many years, and held posts in language teaching/teacher education and applied linguistics in UK, Europe, Middle East and South East Asia.

From 1992-2020, he worked at Birmingham University college of Medical and Dental Sciences (CMDS), where he was Professor of Clinical Communication. He founded and led the Interactive Studies Unit (ISU), which researches and teaches aspects of medical language and communication to health professionals, and students of the health professions.

He was also Birmingham’s Lead for Education Quality for all Programmes offered by CMDS, and therefore worked closely with bodies such as the UK General Medical Council, General Dental Council, Nursing and Midwifery Council, etc.

He has published widely in Clinical Communication, Applied Linguistics and related areas, with research published in The Lancet, BMJ, Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching Journal, amongst many others. He is the author of Language and Clinical Communication: this bright Babylon (2008). More recent writing has looked eg at Medicine and Philosophy (Skelton 2020), support for students and qualified doctors in professional difficulty (Skelton et al 2018), and attitudes of doctors to patients they have learned from (Skelton et al 2016). He has also taught short courses on Writing for Publication on many occasions.

John has undertaken short consultancies in dozens of countries around the world. He was awarded membership of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) in 2002, and in 2016 became one of the very few non-clinicians ever to be awarded an Honorary Fellowship of RCGP.

He retired in 2020, and is now Emeritus Professor at the University of Birmingham. He is currently President of the European Association of Language Teachers in Healthcare.

Catherine Richards Golini, PhD
Founder and Board Member

Catherine lives in Italian Switzerland. She currently works as a teacher and teacher trainer of English for medical purposes, as a medical English editor and proofreader and a language consultant in the area of clinical trial lay summaries.

Her interests and expertise lie in the field of vocabulary, particularly general and lay-technical vocabulary in medicine, and its under-appreciated role in successful communication and patient-practitioner encounters. Her PhD thesis applied corpus linguistic techniques to uncover the hidden lexical characteristics of written patient information for radiography  She is a reviewer for the Elsevier journal ‘English for Specific Purposes’ and is the founder of EALTHY, which was set up after the success of the 1st English for Healthcare conference in Locarno, Switzerland.

Louise Atkinson
Board Member

Louise Atkinson lives in Bern, Switzerland and teaches English to biomedical analysts as well as general English to both adults and adolescents. Her experience has included designing language courses for IT businesses and government departments. Her medical English teaching has led her to create and maintain an E-learning platform for her biomedical students.

Her interests lie in blended learning, the teaching of vocabulary and generating materials, some of which find their way to the EALTHY website. She also organises teacher training sessions and edits academic theses. She attended the first 1st English for Healthcare conference in Locarno, Switzerland where she first met Catherine and heard about EALTHY. She is a keen runner, albeit a slow one.

Petra Zrníková, PhD
Membership Secretary

Petra Zrníková is based in Slovakia. She has changed her career from a university lecturer to a freelance translator and a mentor for newbie translators in medical field.

She translates documents related to surgery, laboratory diagnostics, clinical trials, pharmacology, and medical records. She has got her medical background at the Jessenius Faculty of Medicine, Comenius University in Bratislava where she taught the courses of General Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health. She designed and taught the course for international certificate examination in UNIcert certification system. Her research was focused on testing communication skills, course material design, and reading comprehension from psycholinguistic perspective.

Virginia Allum
Head of Resources

Virginia is Head of Medical English at SLC and works as a freelance medical English and OET test item writer.

She is the author of several online Medical English and OET preparation courses published by SLC, including English for Nurses, English for Doctors, English for Care, Medical Terminology,  and Reach OET B Medicine and Nursing.

As a freelance writer she co-authored the Cambridge Guide to OET Nursing and the Cambridge English for Nursing textbooks.

Chris Moore
Director and Board Member

Chris is Managing Director of SLC, who provide online Medical English services to the global healthcare sector.

SLC train hundreds of nurses and doctors every year, work on Medical English projects in different parts of the world, and publish online Medical English and OET preparation courses used by teaching institutions, healthcare employers and individuals in over 75 countries.

Bethan Edwards
Head of Professional Development

Bethan has taught at schools and universities, trained teachers, written courses and materials, run assessment projects, and managed schools.

As Academic Director at SLC, she works with healthcare clients around the world to design, deliver and manage clinical English, OET and IELTS preparation courses for nurses, doctors, pharmacists and healthcare students.

Get in touch

Or you can write to us:

EALTHY / SLC
Sussex Innovation Centre
University of Sussex
Falmer, BN1 9SB
United Kingdom