We're delighted to announce that Virginia Allum, SLC’s Head of Medical English, has co-authored the ‘OET Preparation, Nursing’ coursebook, just published by Cambridge University Press (CUP).
It’s no surprise that CUP invited Virginia to be one of the authors. She is a leading expert on all things OET. She wrote SLC’s market-leading Reach OET B Medicine and Reach OET B Nursing courses, co-wrote OET’s online course, led the SLC OET Premium Preparation Provider accreditation process, runs the OET Preparation Hints facebook page and www.oetprep.com blog, and co-created SLC’s OET teacher training course.
Not only that, Virginia is both an excellent and a prolific writer of Medical English materials. She has written many of SLC’s ground-breaking online medical English courses – for doctors, nurses and care, as well as Medical Terminology. She co-authored the CUP English for Nurses textbooks, used by nursing colleges worldwide, and has published her own English language teaching materials on a wide range of medical areas.
Virginia is a rare beast in English language world. As an ex-nurse and nursing lecturer, she combines deep subject expertise with an ability to write about language and language acquisition in an accessible and effective way. The feedback we get on the courses she wrote, both OET preparation and medical English, is consistently excellent.
Virginia makes a contribution that she may herself be unaware of. Taking OET and achieving the grades required by regulatory bodies such as the NMC or GMC in the UK, means we have many more nurses and doctors to look after patients that would otherwise have been the case. The UK has current shortages of 40,000 nurses, 10,000 doctors and 5,000 GPs, so every medical professional joining the UK National Health Service makes a real difference to the hundreds of patients they treat every year.
Virginia’s medical English courses also impact on the medical and nursing students taking them, turning what can be seen as dry, uninteresting language learning content and into humorous, engaging and varied online study materials, used increasingly by universities around the world.
So, huge congratulations to Virginia on the publication of OET Preparation, Nursing and we look forward very much to seeing what she does next.