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Increasing the amount of healthcare education we provide through the medium of Welsh has benefits for both practitioners and their patients. Lecturer Gaynor Williams from our Welsh language team tells us more.

The School of Healthcare Sciences is fully committed to developing a positive culture within the School around the use of the Welsh language, including access to Welsh medium education where possible. Our dedicated Welsh language team ensure a proactive approach to the provision of Welsh language education; our remit includes responsibility for driving an increase in the provision of Welsh language education at undergraduate level as well as supporting students who use Welsh in the course of their studies and colleagues involved in providing this.

Language is an integral part of who we are. It’s true that when accessing healthcare patients are often ill, in pain, or feeling unusually vulnerable, and so it’s incredibly important that we are able to communicate with them in their own language. But with 20% of the Welsh population speaking Welsh, enabling people to access healthcare in their own language should be achievable for all – practitioners should be able to respond to the preferences (and not just the needs) of their patients.

On the other hand, it’s equally important that practitioners feel confident in a healthcare setting when managing patients who wish to speak Welsh. Anecdotally, some students have felt unprepared for the ‘Welshness’ of some of their placements. It’s vital that the University responds to the responsibility of preparing students for the workplace by normalising the use of the Welsh language in healthcare.

Increasing the availability of education through the medium of Welsh is an important part of this process. Historically, access to Welsh medium education in the School  has been ad hoc, and varied greatly across disciplines. – For example, Welsh speaking personal tutors were allocated by chance, and within the nursing pre-registration programme, no credits were available through the medium of Welsh;  we were unable to offer the option of completing assessments in Welsh. In the two years since I’ve been in post, we’ve taken huge strides forward.

In support of the University’s Welsh language policy, students are now able to request to undertake both verbal and written assessments in Welsh, and pre-admission questionnaires help us to assign Welsh speaking personal tutors to those who request them, where possible. Thanks to the support and proactive approach of colleagues across the School we have identified 40 credits in adult nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and diagnostic radiography that students enrolling in 2016 will be able to complete through the medium of Welsh, if they wish. To implement new ways of identifying Welsh speaking mentors and practice placement educators for students on placement, the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol has funded a new Welsh language lecturer. Anwen Davies, who joined the School in August, will be responsible for creating a clear process to enable those students who wish to undertake Welsh language placements to do so where possible.

In collaboration with the School of Medicine, we were recently awarded a £31,000 grant by the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol to develop reusable learning opportunities. The first phase of the project has been the development of Welsh medium e-learning resources focus on the teaching of clinical skills – including the importance of communication. These consist of a series of short instructional films demonstrating fundamental skills – blood pressure monitoring, taking temperatures, basic life support – that will sit on the University’s virtual learning environment. Available in both English and Welsh, these films will form part of the Fundamentals of Care module undertaken by pre-registration nursing students but are cross-curriculum in nature. Not only will other disciplines within the Schools of Healthcare and Medicine be able to utilise them, but they can be made available to all health schools in Wales.

Further projects include the introduction of an inter-disciplinary journal club for Welsh language academics working within the healthcare arena, and the provision of Welsh language lessons for staff at the University’s Heath Park campus as part of the College of Biomedical and Life Sciences’ staff development programme following the successful pilot scheme run by the Schools of Healthcare and Medicine.  And there’s more we can do - the School’s commitment to the importance of the Welsh language is an integral part of its contribution to the culture, society and health of Wales. Watch this space!