German language training for the Klinik St. Josef, Saint Vith

Unfortunately, the Covid-19 crisis did not spare the medical staff of Belgian hospitals. In the wake of the pandemic, which affected us all, the hospital sector has faced persistent personnel shortages. For one of our clients, the St. Vith Clinic in the German-speaking region of Belgium, qualified personnel were becoming increasingly scarce. In order to guarantee continuous healthcare services, management had to react quickly and widen the clinic’s geographical recruitment pool in order to hire French-speaking staff. It was in this context that the clinic’s training manager contacted us.

A very specific challenge

The problem to be resolved was clear: the new French-speaking staff could not communicate with their German-speaking patients or colleagues. This linguistic complication led to communication difficulties within the team and during exchanges with patients who often felt that they were not understood. Confronted with this problem, we developed a language training project that was entirely adapted to the Klinik St. Josef.

Meeting the challenge

We proposed a project tailored to the hospital sector to the training manager: content was entirely adapted to hospital care and involved completely personalized methods.
Our head of pedagogy and one of our language trainers designed teaching material that was adapted to the levels and professions of the clinic staff (nurses, doctors, administrative personnel, etc.)

In order to guarantee rapid learning :

• we carried out language testing using Accent Languages’ very own ELAO test to divide learners into groups with similar levels;
• we planned two-hour sessions every week;
• we limited the number of learners to 6 participants per group.

Fine-tuning for a perfect training course

After several hours of training, we analysed the intermediate results and found that we could respond to the clinic’s needs more effectively by slightly modifying the way the participants were trained.

As a result, we fine tuned the groups so that they were composed of participants with similar jobs and the same language level. This adjustment aimed to reinforce the job focused approach of the training courses and we took the opportunity to limit the groups to 4 people in order to maximise speaking time.

Following discussions with the on-call staff, we realised that our language courses were taking place before they went on call. We therefore decided to reduce the length of the sessions to 1.5 hours so that they could remain attentive during the language classes all the while ensuring that they would be fresh for their following shifts.

A successful conclusion

We were able to offer the Klinik St. Josef language training courses that were adapted to the daily professional life of the members of the institution’s medical and administrative staff. As this fine example demonstrates, Accent Languages’ strength lies in its ability to provide tailor-made support for our clients’ training projects; we are able to adapt our approach to any profession all the while remaining flexible and receptive to shifting needs throughout our training courses.