SLC present digital pan-India Nursing English programme at UK SkillsFest25
The annual UK SkillsFest, organised by the Department of Business and Trade and the UK Skills Partnership, showcases the best in British education and training, focusing on innovation, internationalisation, and vocational education that is used – or can be used – by governments, educators and employers across the world. We were delighted to be selected to present at this year’s edition.
SLC’s session focused on how we worked with Ebek, our India partners, to design and deliver a 4-year digital English for Nursing syllabus for nursing students at colleges across India. The curriculum combines nursing-specific clinical English with medical terminology, grammar for healthcare and medical writing skills, with materials drawn from the 850+ hours of healthcare-content published by SLC and used by educators worldwide.
Low levels of English excludes Indian nurses from opportunity
Ebek had identified a language skills deficit among Indian nurses. Poor levels of English exclude many from working in larger hospitals or overseas, and from professional development opportunities available in English, from conferences to seminars, journals to nursing textbooks. Even many hospital forms, reports and patient charts in India are in English, as staff often come from different regions across the country.
In many ways this is not surprising and is certainly not unique to India. Nurses had not been prepared to communicate in professional English by secondary education, and college language programmes were fragmented, under-resourced and often didn’t focus on the practical English needed by nurses when working.
Meet Nurs-Eng: improving and standardising Nursing English in nursing colleges
To address this problem, it made sense to start with nursing education, so future nurses enter the workplace with much stronger professional English.
Together, we developed Nurs-Eng, combining Ebek’s deep market knowledge, access to English teachers and relationships with nursing colleges with SLC’s digital content and expertise in Nursing English course creation and teacher training.
This 3- and 4-year blended learning programme consists of 60 hours face-to-face teaching with 60-80 hours of digital learning a year that can be done on any device and tracked online. Teachers were recruited, inducted and trained on how to give the courses. Lesson plans were developed.
Nurs-Eng courses are therefore standardised in all the colleges adopting the curriculum no matter where they are – with consistent materials, teaching and assessment. Regular review enables the course to be updated and improved.
The early results are in
Early results have been impressive. Nurs-Eng has been running for two years and already we see significant improvements in the Nursing English of many of the student nurses. The slides show a snapshot of how English levels demonstrated by participants in a nursing college in Hyderabad have increased. Over 7,500 students have taken the courses so far and we hope many more will join.
Going beyond India
Many universities and hospitals have adapted SLC’s digital English content for their learners – from Vietnam to Italy, Saudi Arabia to Indonesia and Uzbekistan.Using digital courses enables content to be customised and trackable with regular updates as healthcare and technology change and improve. And not only for nurses. SLC’s courses also include English for medicine, pharmacy, radiography and care, as well as cross-healthcare courses on terminology, grammar, academic study skills and writing research.
If you have healthcare students or professionals who need to improve their professional English, please get in touch to see how we can help.