Teach your students effective communication skills with AI

The Employer Set Project (ESP) is a T Level Health assessment students complete at the end of Year 1. It is 30% of the Year 1 grade and students need to demonstrate the Core Skills they have learnt throughout the year.

Three of the five ESP tasks focus on Core Skill 2: Communication Skills. It is vital students practise this skill in preparation for the assessment but also for their own professional development.

What communication skills do I need to teach T Level Health students?

T Level Health students must be able to communicate clearly and effectively with a variety of stakeholders including patients, carers and health professionals.

You will need to teach your students to:

• Communicate in a clear and unambiguous way, tailoring language and technical information to the stakeholder.
• Actively and critically listen to the individual’s contributions and respond to individual’s questions.
• Speak clearly and confidently when talking to patients and their families.

T Level Health students also need to use a range of techniques to overcome communication barriers, including:

• Succinctness
• Avoid using slang or jargon that may confuse the patient.
• Retain an awareness of cultural differences.

How can I teach T-Level Health Communication Skills?

Students need lots of opportunities to practise and develop this core skill.

One way to do this involves students pretending to be patients for other students to interact with. However students can find it very challenging to stay in the role of the patient when they are with their friends, which decreases the realism of the scenario.

Another option is for teachers to play the part of the patient. However if you’re participating in the scenario yourself, it is impossible to assess your students’ skills objectively.

The best way to support your students’ communication skills, is to use the latest developments in AI technology.

T Level Health products for Communication Skills

AI patient simulation from PCS Spark is the ideal resource.

PCS Spark is an online library of AI patients that your students interact with via a tablet or laptop. The digital patients can understand over 30,000 questions and answer with scenario specific responses.

Students can interact with a diverse range of patients from different cultural backgrounds, with different clinical scenarios.

PCS Spark gives you an assessment tool function, so you can assess whether students have met the learning objectives and plan out what they need to work on.

SimVox

Using the same conversational AI technology as PCS Spark, SimVox is a an AI Smart speaker you can use with your existing manikin. 

With the speaker placed beside the manikin, students can practise communicating with patients in the most realistic and true-to-life healthcare environment.

Freeing you up to observe and assess your student's speaking and listening skills. Simvox comes with 6 ready-to-use scenarios, so you can get started straight away.

Find out more about the ESP and Core Skills requirements on the NCFE website