Kochi: India and particularly Kerala continues to be a major supplier of healthcare professionals, especially nurses, to the Western nations and Australia, but experts say that communication skills are key in equipping them to deal with challenges at hand. “Understanding the patients’ needs, communicating with the bystanders, be reassuring and empathetic and conveying difficult messages in comfortable manner, all these are important.
“Then one has to be familiar with the nuances of English language like structure and grammar, accent and dialects,” said Richard Brown from Australia, the chief operating officer of Occupational English Test (OET) conducted by the Cambridge Boxhill Language Assessment, a venture between Cambridge Assessment English and Box Hill Institute. OET is the language test equivalent to IELTS but is special in the sense it is the only one of its kind conducted for healthcare professionals. OET is recognised by Uni-ted Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore and UAE.
“These days patients come after browsing Google and doctors have to clarify their doubts arising therein. Some of the pati-ents need data while some need only a reassuring voice. So understanding patients and communicating with them properly and effectively is important for each healthcare professional from doctor to nurse to physiotherapist and a rehabilitation professional,” said Richard Brown.
“There is a high degree of opinion about the healthcare professionals coming from Kerala and the numbers of the personnel especially nurses recruited from the state is high. The state holds 30 percent share of our overall recruitment. The National Health Service of UK is still in need of a lot of nurses and hence there are much more opportunities in offing,” said Sujata Stead, CEO of OET.
“The body language is important. It is important to identify how to speak and when not to speak. There is a general pattern among people across countries on which also the OET training equip students,” said Sujata.
