I have been back in Australia for a month now on a brief visit to arrange for my mother to retum to the UK and live with me. Like many others of my age group, I am faced with the planning of the best care I can arrange for my mother, who has enough dementia not to be able to care for herself.
She is fortunate, in that she can come and live in a same small town as me, with her grand-daughter moving in with her as well. As I have been sorting things out, I have been looking at what is available here in terms of Aged Care and have refreshed my knowledge of the Aged Care system in Australia (having lived in the UK for the past 7 years).
I am also refreshing my knowledge of what's been happening in the OET world. It appears that there are quite a few examples of expansion - New Zealand and India, in particular. This week, I am travelling to the Gold Coast to speak with nurse educators at the Gold Coast University Hospital about my experiences working with CALD nursing and medical students and graduate healthcare professionals in the UK. Whilst OET is sadly not accepted as a medical English test for the UK at the moment, I still draw on many of the structures, when producing materials for the UK and Europe.
I will talk about this in a future blog post, however, today I wanted to point you towards some of the videos from the recent OET Forum. One stood out for me - click on the link below to watch it. It is certainly worth watching the other videos, but Rosalind Preston's video stood out for me.
Rosalind is a Nurse Educator at the Royal Talbot Rehabilitaion Centre in Melbourne. She spoke about the 'struggle' of coming to work in Australia (and, you can insert New Zealand here too) and highlighted some of the Mental Health issues of grappling with culture and medical language acquisition.
It made me pause for a minute and remind myself of just how difficult it is to become confident with the specific language needed to perform safely in a healthcare environment. Rosalind mentioned Tuckman's stages of group development to illustrate what happens, when a new nurse (any healthcare worker) arrives at the centre (read: a new ward). They start a process of trying to fit into a new team structure, whilst at the same time realising that the English language skills they thought were sufficient, are not (after all, they'd passed a general English test).
Much food for thought. I look forward to sharing experiences with the Nurse Educators in my old 'stomping ground' (I used to teach at the Gold Coast TAFE in the 2000s).
She is fortunate, in that she can come and live in a same small town as me, with her grand-daughter moving in with her as well. As I have been sorting things out, I have been looking at what is available here in terms of Aged Care and have refreshed my knowledge of the Aged Care system in Australia (having lived in the UK for the past 7 years).
I am also refreshing my knowledge of what's been happening in the OET world. It appears that there are quite a few examples of expansion - New Zealand and India, in particular. This week, I am travelling to the Gold Coast to speak with nurse educators at the Gold Coast University Hospital about my experiences working with CALD nursing and medical students and graduate healthcare professionals in the UK. Whilst OET is sadly not accepted as a medical English test for the UK at the moment, I still draw on many of the structures, when producing materials for the UK and Europe.
I will talk about this in a future blog post, however, today I wanted to point you towards some of the videos from the recent OET Forum. One stood out for me - click on the link below to watch it. It is certainly worth watching the other videos, but Rosalind Preston's video stood out for me.
Rosalind is a Nurse Educator at the Royal Talbot Rehabilitaion Centre in Melbourne. She spoke about the 'struggle' of coming to work in Australia (and, you can insert New Zealand here too) and highlighted some of the Mental Health issues of grappling with culture and medical language acquisition.
It made me pause for a minute and remind myself of just how difficult it is to become confident with the specific language needed to perform safely in a healthcare environment. Rosalind mentioned Tuckman's stages of group development to illustrate what happens, when a new nurse (any healthcare worker) arrives at the centre (read: a new ward). They start a process of trying to fit into a new team structure, whilst at the same time realising that the English language skills they thought were sufficient, are not (after all, they'd passed a general English test).
Much food for thought. I look forward to sharing experiences with the Nurse Educators in my old 'stomping ground' (I used to teach at the Gold Coast TAFE in the 2000s).
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