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andoryu · Joined: 15 Apr 2007 Posts: 4 Location: UK

I have just completed a PhD in English for Clinical Communication and have helped set up courses for various med schools in different countries, but now am UK based in a medical school here.

Terminology is in fact rather easy to learn without a native speaker teacher. Many of us will be familiar with the motivated student who has memorised reams of vocab but cannot use it communicatively. Another problem is that many learners will know jargon but have no idea that many in an English speaking lay population may not be familiar with an English or latin medical term. An example: a group of Taiwanese nursing students all knew tinea pedis (athlete's foot) but the two American simulated patients had no clue what this meant. Part of my role is to see English L2 doctors who have had complaints about their English. It is usually around too much terminology, not too little, as well as politeness strategies and intonation.

The direction EMP is beginning to take is a new focus on the process of communication. Teaching is taught on things like breaking bad news, dealing with complaints, communicating in emergency situations. These are things that your paramedic experience will help you with. The use of role players (simulated patients) is also something that is really quite exciting for interactive work. One of my favourite pieces of work was running a training day in a Spanish hospital in one of the large resorts. We had role players playing tourists and then 1 on 1 teaching afterwards with the video tape, as well as some more general teaching.

Terminology has a place, but is perhaps more relevant to the training of medical interpreters than to healthcare students, who will learn it competently anyway. The other area in EMP, which I personally find dull to teach, is on how to read and write papers for publication. Although I find this uninspiring it is still necessary and important. A lot of this is straightforward EAP work, but medical journals have their own style and there is a very large market for this kind of work. I funded a lot of my student days by 'editing' (or as I would call it drastic rewriting) of submissions for international journals from Japanese medics. Whenever we've run a workshop on writing for publication in a country where English is not the majority language, they have been hopelessly oversubscribed.

In terms of finding work, as previous posters have mentioned, this is an area that established ESL/EFL teachers tend to move into, rather than specialist EMP teachers being recruited fresh so to speak. However in your shoes, I would target nursing and allied health science schools in the first instance, as they have more enlightened hiring policies than medical schools in my experience. I've had to become a behavioural scientist as well as an EMP tutor just to get a medical school to accept me. Your previous employment will be a major plus I am sure in this regard.

Hope that gives some ideas. Good luck!!