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Spend a day with us in thought-provoking discussions on AI usage in teaching and learning of English for healthcare. Join us on 26th April, between 8:00 – 16:30 (UK time), for the virtual symposium, where we´ll dedicate an entire day to discussions on the current and future role of AI in clinical communication and medical education from multiple perspectives.
The speakers will provide you with fascinating insights into this technology. They will present a theoretical background and a review of the latest research as well as share their experience and tips on using AI in teaching and materials design. The topics include:
We’ll end the event with a panel session, where the speakers will discuss their perspectives on the future role of AI in language and medical education and related fields.
To learn more about the speakers and their presentations, click the title.
The event is free of charge for EALTHY members. The non-member fee is £30. Save your place today!
Chris Jacobs, Zephy Da Custodia Steel, Theo Clay
This plenary session explores the novel role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in improving communication skills among healthcare professionals. Emphasising the critical importance of empathy in patient interactions, the session highlights how AI patient simulations can provide realistic practice scenarios.
Virginia Allum, Neil Harris, Chris Jacobs, Petra Zrníková
Moderator: Chris Moore
Alexandra Csongor, Aniko Berta, Csilla Egyed, Renata Nagy
The presentation aims to provide educators with practical strategies for effectively teaching history-taking in English to non-native medical students, integrating AI tools and simulated patient encounters to enhance learning outcomes and prepare students for real-world clinical practice.
Marwa Alnajjar, Shooq Altamimi, Paula Canales
This presentation focuses on a five-phase project that utilised Generative AI (GenAI) to create tailored ESP listening materials. Addressing the limitations of current resources, three lecturers leveraged ChatGPT and text-to-audio generators to create listening scripts, questions, and audio for an English for Nursing module.
Virginia Allum
Initially, Virginia viewed AI as a time saver, allowing her to make videos quicker than ever before. But soon she learned that AI was not an ‘out of the box’ tool. In this talk, Virginia will show you an example of an AI-generated video and compare it with the video she wanted to make.
Ioana Cretu, Neil Harris
By giving examples from their practice with OET candidates, Ioana and Neil aim to encourage both teachers and learners to benefit from using AI tools rather than condemning and avoiding it when enhancing writing competence.
Veronika Glogarová
The research explores the perspectives of PhD medical students on using AI tools in their academic work. During her talk Veronika will discuss the issues around ensuring academic integrity, (non)understanding the overall context and insufficient training provided to educators and students.
Petra Zrníková
This literature review discusses the current and future role of AI in clinical medicine, mainly in early diagnosis, data analysis, and personalised treatment, and points out the most common ethical and legal issues.
Irena Aleksić-Hajduković, Ana Mužar
This research-based session will offer practical suggestions for incorporating GenAI and DDL for designing activities and lesson plans aimed at enhancing teaching of medical and academic collocations.
Beata Walesiak
The talk will explore the current role of apps and AI-based tools in enhancing learners’ communication skills and examine how some tools can support educators in creating targeted classroom materials as well as encouraging self-directed learning. Finally, it will round off by suggesting future directions for integrating AI tools into healthcare-related English language training.
Spend a day with us in thought-provoking discussions on AI usage in teaching and learning of English for healthcare. Join us on 26th April, between 8:00 – 16:15 (UK time), for the virtual symposium, where we´ll dedicate an entire day to discussions on the current and future role of AI in clinical communication and medical education from multiple perspectives.
The speakers will provide you with fascinating insights into this technology. They will present a theoretical background and a review of the latest research as well as share their experience and tips on using AI in teaching and materials design. The topics include:
We’ll end the event with a panel session, where the speakers will discuss their perspectives on the future role of AI in language and medical education and related fields.
To learn more about the speakers and their presentations, click the title.
The event is free of charge for EALTHY members. The non-member fee is £30. Save your place today!
Chris Jacobs, Zephy Da Custodia Steel, Theo Clay
This plenary session explores the novel role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in improving communication skills among healthcare professionals. Emphasising the critical importance of empathy in patient interactions, the session highlights how AI patient simulations can provide realistic practice scenarios.
Virginia Allum, Neil Harris, Chris Jacobs, Beata Walesiak, Petra Zrníková
Moderator: Chris Moore
Alexandra Csongor, Aniko Berta, Csilla Egyed, Renata Nagy
The presentation aims to provide educators with practical strategies for effectively teaching history-taking in English to non-native medical students, integrating AI tools and simulated patient encounters to enhance learning outcomes and prepare students for real-world clinical practice.
Marwa Alnajjar, Shooq Altamimi, Paula Canales
This presentation focuses on a five-phase project that utilised Generative AI (GenAI) to create tailored ESP listening materials. Addressing the limitations of current resources, three lecturers leveraged ChatGPT and text-to-audio generators to create listening scripts, questions, and audio for an English for Nursing module.
Virginia Allum
Initially, Virginia viewed AI as a time saver, allowing her to make videos quicker than ever before. But soon she learned that AI was not an ‘out of the box’ tool. In this talk, Virginia will show you an example of an AI-generated video and compare it with the video she wanted to make.
Ioana Cretu, Neil Harris
By giving examples from their practice with OET candidates, Ioana and Neil aim to encourage both teachers and learners to benefit from using AI tools rather than condemning and avoiding it when enhancing writing competence.
Veronika Glogarová
The research explores the perspectives of PhD medical students on using AI tools in their academic work. During her talk Veronika will discuss the issues around ensuring academic integrity, (non)understanding the overall context and insufficient training provided to educators and students.
Petra Zrníková
This literature review discusses the current and future role of AI in clinical medicine, mainly in early diagnosis, data analysis, and personalised treatment, and points out the most common ethical and legal issues.
Irena Aleksić-Hajduković, Ana Mužar
This research-based session will offer practical suggestions for incorporating GenAI and DDL for designing activities and lesson plans aimed at enhancing teaching of medical and academic collocations.
Beata Walesiak
The talk will explore the current role of apps and AI-based tools in enhancing learners’ communication skills and examine how some tools can support educators in creating targeted classroom materials as well as encouraging self-directed learning. Finally, it will round off by suggesting future directions for integrating AI tools into healthcare-related English language training.
Over the past year, the world has gradually recovered from the shock caused in early 2022 by a “sudden” invasion of AI into various industries. Today we would hardly find one which has been left out. When searching the internet and research databases, one would find out that the use of AI in healthcare is not such a surprise. What´s new is the intensity as well as the new spheres in which the technology is being implemented.
The rapid development and the race for companies to dominate on the global market pose concerns for many healthcare professionals and patients. In my presentation, I will provide a literature review of some of ethical and legal issues as well as positive impacts of AI on diagnosis.
Articles I reviewed, explain how AI works in diagnosis, provide examples of real-world experience, and highlight the gradual improvement of accuracy and early disease detection features in AI-driven medical equipment. The authors also outlined the future directions of AI such as personalized medicine and processing large volumes of data. The most frequently discussed ethical and legal issues include showing empathy and support, sensitive data safety, and differences in jurisdictions worldwide.
Petra is a freelance teacher and translator from English to Slovak. She had been teaching English for General Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health at the Jessenius Faculty of Medicine in Martin, Commenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia (2012-2019). She has been Membership Secretary at EALTHY since 2015.
Join us for this one-day event dedicated to discussions on the role of AI in healthcare communication and education.
AI has been heralded by many as a new dawn in materials creation. During the last year, I started exploring how much AI can help me to generate learning resources, specifically dialogues of role plays set in the healthcare environment. Videos I’ve developed in the past have been included in online courses with learning activities to be done before and afterwards. Other videos have been ‘stand-alone’ videos uploaded to my YouTube channel.
Initially, I viewed AI as a time saver, allowing me to make videos quicker than ever before, but I soon learned that AI was not an ‘out of the box’ tool. The language suggested was US-centric and not appropriate. The phrases suggested weren’t my Voice, either. They didn’t showcase particular communication skills I wanted to focus on either.
In this talk, I will show you an example of an AI-generated video and compare it with the video I wanted to make with the caveat that I am a beginner user of AI and AI still has a way to go to serve all our needs.
Virginia Allum is an experienced medical English writer, Head of Medical English at SLC, Head of Materials Development at EALTHY, owner of a YouTube channel (Medical English Videos) and item writer for OET. Her work includes the development of worksheets, activities and medical English videos.
Join us for this one-day event dedicated to discussions on the role of AI in healthcare communication and education.
Clear communication is vital in healthcare as effective pronunciation and intonation not only ensure intelligibility but also help build trust and rapport with patients.
The Communicative Framework for Teaching Pronunciation (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010) has been applied in an English language classroom setting to balance explicit form-focused training with opportunities to practice language in authentic contexts, as it aims to ensure that learners develop both accurate speech and effective communicative competence. In this context, some apps and AI tools are emerging as effective means to extend these pedagogical strategies. But do they really offer real-time, personalized feedback and adaptive practice opportunities?
The talk will explore the current role of apps and AI-based tools in enhancing learners’ communication skills and examine how some tools can support educators in creating targeted classroom materials as well as encouraging self-directed learning. Finally, it will round off by suggesting future directions for integrating AI tools into healthcare-related English language training.
Beata has cooperated with schools, academic institutions, start-ups and corporations within the domain of educational technologies, (mobile-assisted) pronunciation training and AI-based speech pedagogy and assessment. She is currently lecturer at Open University, University of Warsaw (UOUW), Product Launch Lead at Lingcosms and Teacher, Teacher Trainer and Researcher Linguist via unpolish.pl. Connecting from Poland, she’s also a long-standing IATEFL PronSIG Committee member.
Join us for this one-day event dedicated to discussions on the role of AI in healthcare communication and education.
Effective medical interview is a cornerstone of healthcare practice. We offer four courses to improve Hungarian medical students’ English history-taking skills in internal medicine and other specialities.
The presentation aims to provide educators with practical strategies for effectively teaching history-taking in English to non-native medical students, integrating AI tools and simulated patient encounters to enhance learning outcomes and prepare students for real-world clinical practice.
The AI-powered tools, including Twee, Diffit, Quizziz, Padlet, and ChatGPT, used in our classrooms provide educators with personalized and innovative teaching materials. The content of history-taking dialogues between medical doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and patients is customized to students’ contextual needs. Integrating these AI-powered methodologies can help prepare students for successful patient interactions in English-speaking healthcare settings. Furthermore, utilizing these cutting-edge technologies can enhance both teaching and learning experiences.
Alexandra, PhD, Habil, is Assistant Professor. Her interests relate to studying English for medical and medical research objectives. She is researching 21st-century challenges in higher education, the use of the internet and telemedicine in doctor-patient communication. She is a trainer at the Simulated Patient programme at the Medical School.
Aniko is PhD student, Assistant Professor. She teaches languages for biomedical purposes and medical communication. She is a third-year PhD student researching L3 motivation, multilingual awareness, and motivation to learn LOTE. She is a trainer at the Simulated Patient programme at the Medical School.
Csilla is a PhD student, Assistant Professor. She teaches languages for biomedical purposes and medical communication, English terminology and communication for dentistry students at the Medical School. Her research interests are Applied Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Telemedicine and Teledentistry.
Renata is PhD student, Assistant Professor. She teaches Languages for Biomedical Purposes, Anatomical and Medical Terminology and Communication for Medical, Dentistry and Biotechnology students. Her research interests are Teledentistry, Telemedicine, Online testing, Communication and Simulated Patients in the field of Medicine.
Join us for this one-day event dedicated to discussions on the role of AI in healthcare communication and education.
If Wet, Wet Wet were writing music today, perhaps it would be AI rather than love that is all around. With AI exerting such a profound and pervasive impact on healthcare and related language education, how best can we leverage AI for international healthcare professionals seeking OET certification? Increased access to shortcuts within exam preparation and performance is, like it or not, a feature of our AI-enhanced reality.
We share our curiosity about the (mis)uses of AI tools for OET and our intentionality about how certain AI tools can enable learners to develop their actual medical writing for OET success and, importantly, beyond. It is our starting point that each learner-writer does and should be actively encouraged to incorporate their unique writing styles, preferences, blind spots and quirks into the process of writing, and that we as teachers should work with them rather than against them.
After introducing an innovative (and paradoxically AI-free approach) to seeing our learners’ often-invisible processes of writing, we will then explore how AI tools can be harnessed by medical English teachers to produce and scale interventions for differentiated and personalised learning.
Ioana is a freelance professional in the field of English for Healthcare and OET teacher at Cretu R. Ioana PFA. She has been over 22 years in ESP and Medical English, including a related PhD, and OET preparation specifically since 2018.
Neil is a Director of Academic Development & Teacher Trainer at Centre for English Language Teaching (CELT), Cardiff, UK. He has been involved in ESP course development and delivery for nearly 30 years and in Medical English since 2017 and is an OET Premium Provider.
Join us for this one-day event dedicated to discussions on the role of AI in healthcare communication and education.
Data-driven learning (DDL) refers to using “language corpus data, tools, and techniques for pedagogical purposes” (Crosthwaite & Boulton, in press). However, with recent developments in the field of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), there has been a need to merge the two approaches in order bridge the existing gaps and transcend the limitations of DDL (Crosthwaite & Baisa, 2023; Mizumoto, 2023).
The insights gained from disciplinary corpora help us upgrade course materials, create “exemplar texts containing a high degree of ‘focus-on-form’…[and] meaningfully contextualise the language forms and meanings under investigation within the dentistry domain” (Crosthwaite & Cheung, 2019).
Relying on our own findings from dental research abstracts, we aim to showcase how teachers of English for Healthcare can benefit from merging GenAI and DDL in order to improve their students’ (prospective healthcare practitioners, PhD students, OET candidates, medical researchers) collocational competence.
This research-based session will offer practical suggestions for incorporating GenAI and DDL for designing activities and lesson plans aimed at enhancing teaching of medical and academic collocations.
Irena is an Assistant Professor at the School of Dental Medicine, University of Belgrade, teaching English for Medicine and Dentistry. Her fields of interest also include Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), Multimodal Pedagogy, and use of software for linguistic research. She is an active member of the European Commission’s Digital Education Hub.
Ana holds a BA and an MA degree in English language, literature, and culture. Presently, she is pursuing her PhD while being employed at the School of Dental Medicine, University of Belgrade, as a Teaching Associate interested in applying the discourse of healthcare communication in her teaching.
Join us for this one-day event dedicated to discussions on the role of AI in healthcare communication and education.
This presentation focuses on a five-phase project that utilised Generative AI (GenAI) to create tailored ESP listening materials. Addressing the limitations of current resources, three lecturers leveraged ChatGPT and text-to-audio generators to create listening scripts, questions, and audio for an English for Nursing module.
Attendees will gain insights into the iterative process of script and question generation, the evaluation of text-to-audio generators, as well as how to produce contextually relevant resources. Furthermore, the presentation will provide valuable insights into the methodology employed, expected outcomes, and implications for future research and educational practices.
By shedding light on the project’s development process, challenges, solutions, and limitations, attendees will gain insights into the application of GenAI in their material development.
Marwa is a Lecturer in English and Acting Academic Team Lead for English for Nursing at RCSI Bahrain. She has 13 years of teaching experience and an MA in ELT from Coventry University, UK. Her interests include teacher training, materials design, and integrating AI in language teaching and learning.
Shooq is a Lecturer in English for Nursing at RCSI Bahrain. She has 12 years of teaching experience and an MA in ELT from Coventry University, UK. Her subject specialisms include threshold concepts, Generative AI, and reflective practices.
Paula is a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at RCSI Bahrain. She received her MA in TESL from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has eight years of experience in the healthcare field as a mental health technician. Currently, she focuses on providing language support to nursing students.
Join us for this one-day event dedicated to discussions on the role of AI in healthcare communication and education.
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in teaching foreign languages within healthcare higher education is gradually changing established pedagogical practices. While we may benefit from personalized learning experiences or broader access to multiple sources, significant doubts persist, such as ensuring academic integrity, (non)understanding of the overall context and insufficient training for educators and students.
This study examines institutional approaches in Czech universities, showing struggles with AI implementation due to inflexibility in adapting to dynamically evolving technological advancements and the absence of clear legal frameworks for AI use.
Moreover, the study explores the perspectives of PhD medical students on using AI tools, such as machine translation software and writing assistance platforms, in their academic work.
Using a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews, the findings reveal scepticism among students. Their concerns include potential collision with academic integrity and hesitancy to share sensitive data with AI. These findings highlight the urgent need for Czech universities to develop comprehensive policies and provide structured support for ethical and effective integration of AI into HE education.
Veronika is the head of the Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, Palacky University in Olomouc. She teaches undergraduate students (English for healthcare), PhD students (courses on Academic writing) and employees of the Faculty. She is particularly interested in the cultural phenomena of academic writing, contrastive rhetoric and AI implementation in teaching languages for healthcare professionals.
Veronika will greatly appreciate your insights and contributions to her research. Please take a moment and complete the questionnaire on AI in language teaching at medical schools here. Your thoughts and ideas are crucial for understanding how AI impacts (and might impact in the future) language learning for future healthcare professionals. Thank you!
Join us for this one-day event dedicated to discussions on the role of AI in healthcare communication and education.
This plenary session explores the novel role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in improving communication skills among healthcare professionals. Emphasising the critical importance of empathy in patient interactions, the session highlights how AI patient simulations can provide realistic practice scenarios. These high-fidelity simulations, featuring lifelike voices, enable healthcare workers to engage in authentic conversations, thereby enhancing their ability to convey empathy and understanding.
Feedback is a cornerstone of training, and AI can offer specific, actionable insights that foster your continuous improvement. This feedback helps healthcare professionals refine their communication techniques, ensuring they are well-prepared for diverse patient interactions.
The session also underscores the significance of psychological safety in training environments. AI simulations create a safe space for healthcare workers to practice and make mistakes without fear of judgment, promoting open learning and confidence-building.
Overall, the integration of AI in communication training programs develops healthcare professionals with enhanced communication skills, characterised by empathy and appropriate content.
Full text: Clay, T. J., Da Custodia Steel, Z. J., Jacobs, C. (November 15, 2024). Human-Computer Interaction: A Literature Review of Artificial Intelligence and Communication in Healthcare. Cureus 16(11): e73763.
Research summary in our Blog section: Using AI Models to Assess Communication in Healthcare
Dr Chris Jacobs, MB BChir MRes MD (res) MRCGP FHEA, has over 20 years’ experience in healthcare education and has interests in communication and appraising educational technology. He is GP, GP trainer, medical student tutor for Universities of Bristol, Oxford, and Kings College London. Also, a researcher in cognitive psychology in communication training at University of Bath.
Zephy is a second-year medical student at Bristol University with interests in AI, clinical innovation, and patient-centred care. His commitment to this field is evident through his published review, which critically examines the potential of AI to improve communication skills among healthcare professionals.
Theo is also a second-year medical student at Bristol University. He also has a keen interest in intersection of AI and communication. As a co-author to the published review, he can see the importance of empathy in how we communicate and how practice is key to success.
Join us for this one-day event dedicated to discussions on the role of AI in healthcare communication and education.
Clay, T. J., Da Custodia Steel, Z. J., Jacobs, C. (November 15, 2024). Human-Computer Interaction: A Literature Review of Artificial Intelligence and Communication in Healthcare. Cureus 16(11): e73763. doi: 10.7759/cureus.73763
The literature review provides an overview of AI´s role in patient-doctor interactions, focusing on overcoming language barriers, summarising complex medical data, and offering empathetic responses. It disproves assumptions of AI as an inaccurate, irrelevant, misleading and unempathetic source of medical information for both healthcare professionals and lay-people.
The review discusses the potential of AI models as tools capable of rapidly summarizing vast amounts of data, providing patients with information on their medical conditions and supportive feedback, and helping healthcare professionals to enhance their clinical communication skills.
The review advocates for further research and policy development to mitigate risks and enhance AI´s integration into clinical practice.
*Incorrect or misleading results generated by AI models casued by insufficient data training, incorrect assumptions made by the model, or biases in the data used to train the model.
Full-text available here: https://www.cureus.com/articles/312796-human-computer-interaction-a-literature-review-of-artificial-intelligence-and-communication-in-healthcare#!/
We’re delighted to announce that EALTHY President John Skelton is one of the experts leading group workshops in the hybrid version of our Writing for Publication course, which adds two 1.5-hour sessions onto the digital course that John wrote.
Anyone who has been to an EALTHY English for Healthcare conference knows just how engaging and thoughtful John is. Now you, your researchers and other academics looking to publish in an international peer-reviewed journal can work directly with him.
John really knows what he’s talking about. 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 has taught courses on Writing for Publication to students in many parts of the world.
Writing for Publication consists of 30 hours of digital study that take researchers through the publishing process in clearly defined steps, covering the language, conventions and process – from planning through to submission, with multiple examples and practical writing tasks.
The workshops build on the course. Participants go through it beforehand and then get input and feedback on the areas they most need. The workshops are for small groups. They are collaborative, practical and focused. At the end, participating researchers will be clear on the next steps they need to take to successfully submit their articles for publication.
Workshops take place on Zoom, though in-person may potentially be arranged. They are delivered either as two 1.5-hour workshops, or as one 3-hour workshop with a break in the middle.
These are designed as group sessions for between 8 and 12 participants. However, bespoke programmes can be designed for different size groups or individuals, or to meet specific needs.
Prices are only from £149 per person for EALTHY members and associated institutions, to include the digital course and any materials.
Just get in touch with us on admin@ealthy.com. We’ll arrange a meeting to go through what you’re looking for and how everything works.
Please note that John’s time is limited, so if you would like to work with him, please let us know as soon as you can.
We’re delighted to announce an exciting new event on the EALTHY calendar for 2025! At the 6th English for Healthcare Conference, the AI-related sessions sparked a lot of interest, and many delegates expressed a wish to explore this topic in more detail!
Join us on Saturday, 26 April 2025 for EALTHY’s virtual symposium, where we’ll dedicate the entire day to discussions on the role of AI in healthcare communication and education. Whether overlaps in the programme meant you missed the AI sessions in Brighton or you simply couldn’t make it in person, now’s your chance to engage with leading voices on this fascinating topic.
The event is free of charge for EALTHY members (register to your account first). The fee for non-members is £30.
The call for proposals is open both to EALTHY members and non-members. However, all presenters must be EALTHY members on the day of the event.
We are looking for presentations on any aspect of AI in education for healthcare, from incorporating AI into teaching English language and communication skills for clinical practice, through AI-oriented research and the challenges it sets in academia, to the use of AI for diagnosis and treatment processes. If you would like to share your expertise and experience, please submit your proposal.
Aside from the presentations, this one-day event will also include 2 plenaries and a panel discussion as well as several opportunities for networking. Plenary speakers will be announced soon!
For further information, follow us here on EALTHY Blog and subscribe for a newsletter below. You can also follow us on social media: LinkedIn Event Page and Facebook Event Page.
For the annual individual membership of €55, you will also have access to a bank of teaching resources, articles and recordings to webinars for your professional development, as well as reduced entry to our bi-annual conference. Learn more about member benefits and join us today.
Tomczyk, Ł.; Mascia, M.L.; Guillen-Gamez, F.D.: Video Tutorials in Teacher Education: Benefits, Difficulties, and Key Knowledge and Skills. Educ. Sci. 2023, 13, 951. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13090951
Based on their experience of online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers focused on a role of video tutorials in learning. They also discussed implementation of digital competences required for creating videos into study programmes at paedagogical faculties. The aim of this research was:
Their presumption is that if “future teachers have adequate cognitive, digital, and communication skills, this will allow future students at any educational stage to learn at their own pace and in their own time, and, consequently, this will foster autonomy and self-regulation of learning.”
The qualitative study is based on a student assignment to create and present a video tutorial and a structured interview aimed to answer three questions:
The results were drawn from answers of 16 student teachers who attended a course about using information technology in education.
The researchers summarized students´ answers and presented them in three categories. The findings included the following statements:
The research has several limitations:
Read the fulltext here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9907203/
This presentation was a real success at the 6th English for Healthcare conference 2024. We are happy that Ros agreed to repeat her talk, so those of you who couldn´t make it have the chance now!
“We condemn attempts to label us as ‘victims,’ a term that implies defeat, and we are only occasionally ‘patients,’ a term that implies passivity, helplessness, and dependence upon the care of others. We are ‘People with AIDS’.”
Since the 1980’s, in an attempt to remove the stigma and dehumanisation associated with HIV-AIDS, US healthcare professionals have been taught to refer to and communicate with their patients using person-first language.
In this talk, we’ll compare the experience of two different communities, considering the impact of ‘person-first language’ on certain patient groups. We’ll also look at how learners can navigate this potential terminology minefield, brainstorming strategies to successfully broach person-first usage in a manner that ensures respectful, inclusive, and supportive language choices as well as how to resolve communication breakdown when necessary.
Read a brief summary of the conference presentation here. The EALTHY members can also download Ros´s conference presentation.
With the global shift towards online learning that took place over 2020 and more recent rapid advances in AI, today’s learners have very different expectations to those they had even 5 years ago. This is notably the case in healthcare, where students learn profession-specific language around demanding study and work commitments. With limited time and unpredictable hours, learning content has to be accessible, convenient, engaging, relevant, and able to meet the evolving demands of a rapidly changing environment.
While traditional textbooks remain part of many curricula, they are not as central to the learning experience as they used to be, as educators and their students increasingly augment courses with topical, media-rich and interactive digital content. However, online resources can often come across as unstructured, unclear and underdeveloped for teaching purposes. And where does one start? The sheer volume of content available can seem overwhelming.
This talk looks at how to address these issues by articulating five key principles of design that, when applied, will not only enable teachers to develop materials that support and engage their learners, but also use them effectively in practice. Understanding the principles behind digital materials design allows educators to create dynamic learning experiences that will effectively support their language programmes, meet learner expectations and produce excellent learning outcomes.
We are happy to share with you presentations from the 6th English for Healthcare conference!
You can read the abstracts on the conference website and download the presentations in the Member section.
Not a member yet? Join us and get more benefits!
We’re looking for EALTHY members to participate in EALTHY’s upcoming series of professional development webinars across 2025.
We know from the recent conference just how rich members’ collective experience is, so it would be great if we can share that knowledge with each other. Here are some of the things we’re looking for:
And please feel free to suggest your suggestions too. For previous topics and recordings of each webinar, please see the Video section.
If you would like to deliver a webinar, please send the following to admin@ealthy.com:
Not a member, but would like to present your ideas and experience to the EALTHY members? Then join us now. Individual membership is still only €55.
The 6th English for Healthcare conference in Brighton was a real success! It’s always great to see so many familiar faces, old friends and colleagues, as well as to meet new ones from around the world. Thank you so much for coming! Some of you came from far away, some of you with adventurous flights redirected to different airports to those scheduled. Despite the rainy weather, the only thing we couldn’t book for you, you kept smiling from the very beginning to the very last moments. Your happy faces were a huge reward for our efforts!
There is no doubt that this has been the most multinational and multicultural English for Healthcare conference ever. Your willingness to join our diverse community shows that EALTHY plays an invaluable role in your professional development. Since the 5th English for Healthcare conference in Belgrade 2022, EALTHY has moved into a new era, but our mission stayed the same. We are here to support you in developing and delivering outstanding English for Healthcare courses, with access to a growing bank of teaching materials, articles, information, and research, as well as the bi-annual conference, regular webinars and other events. To support our work, EALTHY’s long-time supporter SLC has become our partner. Chris Moore and his team are working to provide a rich resource bank of teaching materials and events for your professional development via the EALTHY website.
The three eminent keynote speakers delivered thought-provoking talks, which covered a variety of issues, from teaching medical humanities, through multilingualism in healthcare, to vaccination-related language. John Skelton, President of EALTHY and Emeritus Professor of Clinical Communication at Birmingham University Medical School, addressed the topic of integrating the arts into clinical communication skills training. Emma Brooks, a lecturer in Language Learning and Intercultural Communication and Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, Institute of Education, discussed how to overcome the inherent challenges of a ‘super-diverse’ multilingual, multicultural healthcare workforce providing care to an equally diverse patient body. Zsofia Demjen, an Associate Professor at University College London, presented the findings of her research on how institutional language plays a role in uncertainty and hesitancy when trying to make vaccination-related decisions, examining the impact of institutional terms on lay discourse.
We’d very much like to thank all our members for your continual support, both online and face to face at the English for Healthcare conference. We got some really positive feedback on the latter for the variety of topics chosen, all providing much food for thought to take home. Many of you also appreciated the communal on-campus accommodation, which provided an additional space away from the venue for more networking and making friends. And the lunches, dinners and croissants all seemed to go down well!
Last but not least, a big ‘thank you’ to the sponsors who not only presented their work as a part of the programme or at their stands, but also joined in with the social events for many informal chats.
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