OET Insights Speaking: Nursing

What should you do in your 3-minute preparation time?  Learn how to read the role-play card, decode the instructions and prepare.

Your role-play will give you a series of tasks.  Learn how to read and understand these to help you plan what to do.

There are just two more things you need to think about in your planning time.  Find out more by watching this short lecture.

First things first: how should you begin?

This unit looks at useful phrases that you can use towards the start of the consultation and you ask open questions.

Now we move on to closed questions, so you can focus on the information you need from your patient to provide them with the care they need.

It's important to be able to ask questions about medical matters in a way that is easy for your patients to understand.  This video looks at some examples of what you should be looking out for and how you can paraphrase medical language into lay, or everyday, terms.

An important part of your job is establishing rapport and it's very important that when you ask questions, they are polite and considerate.  Let's look at the language that we can use to do this.

There are two times when checking understanding is essential.  The first, is when you're taking patient history.  You want to make sure you've understood everything correctly.  We'll look at some phrases you can use to do that in this video.  In the second part, which you can find later on in the Language Practice Library, we'll look at how you can check that your patient has understood you.

This video looks at how you can group ideas together and signpost them to the patient to give the consultation structure and make it easier for them to understand the process.

Find out how you can use firm but polite language to give your patients strong advice and warnings.

It's not always easy to tell a busy chef that they need to think about their diet.  That's definitely not the news they want to hear!  They may get difficult or upset, so how should you react?  This unit looks at soft skills and gives you examples of language that can help you deal with these kinds of situations.

There are times when you will have to negotiate with a patient.  This may be because they are finding it difficult to follow the advice you've given them, or because they don't agree with your suggestions.  This unit looks at some phrases you can use to negotiate and which you can use to demonstrate shared responsibility.

Once you've given the patient treatment advice, it's important to make sure they understood what you've told them.  If not, their aftercare may suffer.  Here are some phrases you can use to help you make sure that your patients are sure about what happens next!

Let's have a look at how you can end the consultation by reassuring the patient, thanking them, and then saying bye.

Listen to a colleague and me going through a role play.  We'll also analyse it for effectiveness and work on some language used in it.

This was a lecture first shown on our YouTube channel.  We look at some everyday lay language that a patient may use with you in real life and look at a role-play connected to the situation.

This was a lecture first shown on our YouTube channel.  We look at some everyday lay language that a patient may use with you in real life and look at a role-play connected to the situation.

This lecture looks at how to offer reassurance and simple advice to a worried parent who is about to take his or her young children away on a camping trip.  Again, we won't go through every single task on the card, but look at some interesting ways to explain points in lay langauge.

In this lesson, we look at a role-play which deals with the topic of contact dermatitis.  We won't go through every single point on the task card, because it's a good idea to try and build up your own way of working through the tasks, but we will look at some options for information giving.

In this lesson, we'll go over a role-play which features a home visit to a patient who has sciatica.  You'll be asked to discuss treatment options.

This role-play is set in a pre-operation ward and you've been asked to prepare the patient for the procedure.  You'll have a set of tasks which feature a lot of information gathering.

In this lesson, we look at a role-play which asks you to deal with a difficult patient.  You have to warn, advise, and stress the importance of compliance.

Let's go over the main ideas to take away from the course and take a look at some further resources that you can use.  There are also 6 role-plays that you can use to practise.