Innovative Digital Language Learning for the Healthcare Sector

The basic idea of IDEAL was the perceived need in the professional networks of the project partners in AT, SK, DE and HU for a higher level of German professional language for specialists working in the healthcare sector. Working with patients and medical situations requires excellent understanding of medical terms and issues and also a high level of communication skills and awareness. Language training available for current or future healthcare workers was not specialised and not tailored to realistic everyday scenarios for e.g. nurses and nursing assistants, and therefore of little help to alleviate the problem. Also, the growing rate of healthcare workers in AT, DE with non-German background and with a professional connection to German patients in case of HU and SK showed us that a development of innovative and accessible language training elements for those target groups was timely and needed, and also feasible for the scope of a KA2 VET project. Additionally, IDEAL wanted to contribute to a modernisation of language teaching, by introducing innovative training approaches into the project partnership and associated stakeholders, thereby improving the quality and relevance of sector-specific and applied language trainings.

The main objective of the IDEAL project consortium from AT, HU, DE, SK was to use modern technologies (such as audiovisual training material and interactive learning tasks and subtitles) to provide tailor-made and practically relevant training materials for healthcare professionals who want to (or are already working in) the healthcare sector in German-speaking countries, or with German-speaking patients. Also, the consortium wanted to raise awareness for the need for constant language proficiency improvement for staff in a growing and critical personal service sector, and contribute to the quality and efficiency development. Naturally, we also wanted to practically test our approach and content with real professionals working in the field of healthcare and collect their feedback in order to improve quality and relevance of our project outputs. In the long term, the IDEAL project was also intended as a test case and pilot activity to use innovative technologies for foreign language study and make language learning more accessible, and use our findings and experiences also for follow-up foreign language trainings in different contexts/settings with various target groups.