Dear Students,

Welcome to the online English for Medical Purposes course. It is short, hopefully enjoyable, and will not overload you with work this semester.  Its primary aim is to show how knowledge of English will become a key resource for you to keep up to date and to help you answer clinical questions and make clinical decisions in future. 

We will introduce the idea of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) and give you opportunities to learn how to use important medical databases to search for and find answers to clinical problems that concern your patients. Don't forget to read the documents in the Forum section to get a fuller description of what EBM means.

There are 4 lessons. Each lesson begins with a case scenario or problem which you will analyze in different ways.  For example, each lesson asks you  to read  about a patient problem, listen to related videos, search online for answers or read medical documents. Some exercises also ask you to answer online quiz. There are also video tutorials to improve your search skills on MEDLINE. These basic skills are important objectives of this course and for the final exam too. Practice them here.

Finally,  I encourage you to contribute to forums with your colleagues which you can do in English and Italian. After all, you will be working in a bilingual environment in medicine - the evidence from clinical research is in English - but your workplace is Italian! One of the aims of EBM is to share and communicate research to keep practitioners up to date. In this way it can also be a potential lever for changes to improve healthcare.  What about in our hospital? The first lesson on hospital infection risks gets you started!

What else? The exercises you do  here and the skills you develop in this module mirror  what you need to do in the final exam in Year 5. 

I hope you find it enjoyable and useful.

Buon Lavoro!

Huon Snelgrove