About Us

Is our course for you?

"I want to study medicine to become a doctor.  My university expects me to be able to speak English well.  I want to learn English but, at the same time, I also want to learn more about medicine."

 

This is the course for you!  Learn English WHILE you learn medicine.  Yes, that's right, learn both at the same time.  Why waste your valuable time learning to speak about dogs and cats and other non-essentials, when all you are really interested in is medicine.   So if medicine is what interests you then lets talk about medicine.   Then, when you do get into medical school one day, your improved English skills and medical knowledge will give your career a head start.  No need to travel, as we provide distance education via video-conferencing and online eLearning modules.

 

Get certificates after doing the modules and a certificate at the end, after an assessment, to prove satisfactory completion of our course.

We empower you to help you achieve your dream of becoming a health professional.

 

Who we are.

A dedicated group of health professionals who help medical, premedical, and other health professional students update their English language skills.

 

Riesa Ginsberg is a Senior Emergency Medicine Physician with over 25 years of hospital experience.

She is also a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland and this year is a student herself, currently undertaking a distance medical education degree (graduate diploma in clinical education) through Flinders University in South Australia.

 

Riesa's Educational Philosophy.:-

 

When medical students learn something new, there is a medical language that they have to learn as well as the concepts related to the new learning itself.  This is difficult even for English speaking learners, but very much more challenging for non-English speaking students.

 

Traditionally the teaching of medicine has focused on the basic sciences in the early years of training, which act as a scaffold for the learner to build onto once they reach the stage of exposure to clinical medicine.  Scaffolded learning is considered a vital step to acquiring new knowledge ie you build your learning on your prior learning.  The problem I see with this approach is that basic sciences have no prior learning to form a scaffold, nor any obvious relevance to a beginner to the process of diagnosing and treating a patient.  Because of this, many students only achieve a superficial grasp of the basic sciences and the knowledge does not "stick".  Even worse, they see the medical course as so irrelevant that they loose motivation.  To encourage the sort of learning where knowledge persists, ie deep learning, the student needs to understand the relevance of what they are learning and, in turn, this appreciation of the relevance helps provide the motivation to learn.

 

What I hope to achieve, as far as the learning of medicine, is to provide training in clinical medicine at a very much earlier stage than would be done at university.  I believe this will help the learner maintain motivation for their medical studies as well as provide a scaffold for future learning.  By having this clinical scaffold in place, the education in the basic sciences (that will be given as part of the learner's formal university medical training ie when the learner gets to the real university medical school) will enable the learner to get much more out of their early years of their medical training.  I believe the medical student will then be able to acquire new knowledge at a deeper level, which will stand them in good stead for the rest of their medical careers.

 

You might well ask how I can scaffold clinical teaching without first teaching my students basic sciences as is done in traditional medical courses.  My proposed solution is that everyone has some prior clinical knowledge.  Take, for example, the free Elearning module I have posted here, where I begin to teach some of the terminology commonly used in the medical field, when discussing fractures.  Nearly all of us know that a bone can break.  Most of us have known someone with a broken bone, and some of us have personal experience of breaking our own bones.  So I start my course by talking about the familiar medical experience.  I teach the student about displaced and undisplaced fractures.  At the same time though, the student is learning a little about bones being a living thing, the inflammatory process with tissue swelling, the diagnosis of a fracture and potential treatment options.  In the next session I can build on this learning to teach a little bone anatomy, some physiology, risk of bone infection (osteomyelits), growth plates of bones etc.  This then forms the basis for further clinical learning, not necessarily about broken bones.

 

As my students learn about medicine, I simultaneously teach them English, which is the second goal of this course.

 

A third goal is for my students to learn how to continue learning on their own, even after this course is finished.  This involves motivating my learners and introducing them to a wide variety of education resources and teaching them how to use these resources.

 

One of my key teaching techniques is role playing and case based discussions, presented in a light hearted and fun way.

 

 

 

Darren Apps has been an Emergency Nurse for over 20yrs.

For much of that time he has been involved in clinical education and has a particular interest in teaching cardiac life support.

 

He has developed educational programs for Medical and Nursing staff to teach them how to respond in emergency situations in the workplace.

 

He understands the challenges facing students with language difficulties, and his friendly, humorous approach to teaching, helps our students achieve their maximum potential whilst at the same time making it an enjoyable experience.

 

Mark Livett

​

 

Hi, I'm Mark.  I've spent many years working as a university medical student coordinator.  I am ready to give you mentoring and English language training to help you succeed in your planned medical career.  This is an online course with interactive learning modules as well as video conferencing for face to face training.

 

 

Do you have trouble pronouncing your Rs and Ls.  Let Kylie Winwood help.  Kylie is an experienced speech pathologist.  She believes in the plasticity of the brain.  ie Neural brain pathways can be modified to help develop your speech patterns.

However Kylie is pregnant and may not be available for our January intake of students.

 

 

We empower you to help you achieve your dream of becoming a health professional.

 

Is our course for you?

"I want to study medicine to become a doctor.  My university expects me to be able to speak English well.  I want to learn English but, at the same time, I also want to learn more about medicine."

 

This is the course for you!  Learn English WHILE you learn medicine.  Yes, that's right, learn both at the same time.  Why waste your valuable time learning to talk about dogs and cats and other non-essentials, when all you are really interested in is medicine.   So if medicine is what interests you then lets talk about medicine.   Then, when you do get into medical school one day, your improved English skills and medical knowledge will give your career a head start.  No need to travel, as we provide distance education via video-conferencing and online eLearning modules.

Enjoy Learning Online