Webinar summary | Teaching Language of Compassion in English

Loredana, an expert in the field of teaching soft skills in English for Special Purposes at the University of Verona, provided valuable ideas and strategies for teaching compassion and caring in healthcare facilities.

To highlight how there is an urgent need to improve the soft skills of healthcare professionals when first meeting migrants seeking medical help shortly after arriving in the target country, Loredana told a story of a migrant girl from Syria. She arrived exhausted from a long, dangerous journey and had to wait several hours for an examination in a hospital where she experienced lack of interest from medical staff, and also a language barrier. Scenarios like this are one of the reasons why Loredana discusses the concepts of patient´s low health-literacy level, migrant-friendly care, and intercultural communication competence with students taking her courses.

In the webinar, Loredana shared video-based activities (links are provided) in which students:

• explore the concept of compassion by using the video. – Students watch and take notes, and draw mind maps.
• translate the video into Italian.
• distinguish the notion of empathy from compassion.
• give examples of sentences to express empathy, which can be then used in role-play dialogues.
• create role-play scenarios where one group shows wrong attitudes and the other one performs correct versions.

Watch the video to learn more about:

• Loredana´s experience of using the activities and students´ feedback on the course.
• The use of TEDx Talks for classroom activities.
• Further resources which you can adapt to meet the needs of your students.
• Teaching assertive attitude for clinical practice.
• Challenges in interactions of multilingual healthcare professionals and patients where one of them or even both might not speak English at all or at a low level, but can speak other languages.