Communication for professionals - nursing.

Nursing is a mobile profession and linguistic and intercultural challenges have become part of professional life. Misunderstandings between nurses, doctors and patients with different cultural backgrounds have an adverse effect on perceived professional status; lead to rejection, stress, job dissatisfaction, burnout, drop out (Van Bogaert, 2009); and affect quality of patient care and treatment failure adversely. Effective communication as the basis of workplace social integration is considered essential to professional nursing practice (AACN, 1998) and learning good communication is central to nursing accreditation standards (Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, 2003). Communication AND language training is therefore crucial for both indigenous and foreign medical professionals.Needs: Medical language competence needs consist of (1) adequate knowledge of vocabulary, colloquial medical language, an acceptable pronunciation, etc.; (2) complex sentences; and (3) appropriate delivery of the language (slowly, clear, empathetic) (Berbyuk Lindström, 2008; Van de Poel & Brunfaut, 2010). Detailed performance analyses identified communication, target-language fossilisation and pragmatic malfunctioning by non-native speaking medical professionals (Van de Poel 2011; Gasiorek 2012).Aims: Nursing on the Move (NoM) helps to develop lifelong language learning practices. Through multilingual online/mobile learning materials and approaches suitable for blended learning, NoM supports learners in vocational and adult education contexts to improve their communication skills in order to promote personal development, employability and high-quality participation in the labour market. Learners find its tailored approach helpful to working in their own space, at their own pace, using the help functions the program provides. It also aims to support linguistic diversity by integrating language- and nursing-related content; promote the transparency and recognition of qualifications and competencies; develop professional entrepreneurialism, and create an optimal milieu for lifelong learning. Objectives: The tool's main objectives are:• To equip nursing staff with communication competencies (CEFR B) to carry out dedicated communicative tasks in a clinical setting by means of scenarios: patient-centred care, diagnostic procedures, food distribution, shift changes, introducing patient cases to and interacting with colleagues. • To develop a system for recognising the competencies acquired. • To create an optimal environment for lifelong learning which fosters mobility in Europe. • To establish a highly effective learning track for online/mobile autonomous/blended learning, taking into account the learning styles of these professionals and supporting their motivation through gamification strategies, multilingual video cases and social network sites. Basis: NoM is data-driven and relies on published data analyses, guidelines and good practice. To date, communication materials for nursing have not been multilingual, blended or tailored to nurses' learning needs. This project is based on an extensive needs analysis: (1) an international literature review (arising from joint research in Belgium and South Africa); (2) large-scale, online self-assessments by European medical professionals (Van de Poel et al. 2007, 2013); (3) reported needs analyses (Gasiorek 2012); (4) empirical data on communication strategies arising from shadowing nurses (Pretorius 2013–2014); (5) findings from the IENE project (2012); and (6) strategies in the Medical Communication Skills book on transcultural communication (Van de Poel et al. 2013), (7) now integrated in the Going International website (2014).

Keywords:WEBSITE, APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Disciplines:Public health care, Public health sciences, Public health services, Linguistics, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies