OET Role Play For Nurses & Doctors: Do I Have To Do The Tasks In The Exact Order?

Today, I want you to picture yourself in your OET speaking examination. We all know that it’s the last exam that you have of the four sections and it is usually done in the afternoon. You sit there and you are looking at your OET role play card that you’ve been provided.

Also, remember that you get two role plays that you have to complete. For example, maybe you’re a doctor and you’ve got five bullet points on that role play card. Perhaps, you may have taken this exam already and you may be able to picture this very well because it’s in recent memory.

The OET Speaking Role Play For Nurses & Doctors

As you’re asking the questions to the interlocutor upon playing the role of the patient, you’re questioning yourself whether it’ll be natural to go through every single bullet point from the first to the fifth accordingly and how you can make the dialogue as natural as possible.

A lot of doctors and nurses and other medical professionals doing OET think they have to go in the exact order that the bullet points are listed. Frankly speaking, you don’t need to do that! It would be very strange if, for example, you took 10 different OET Speaking Exams in 10 different testing centers (UK, Dubai, India, Australia, etc.) and all the interlocutors answered the exact same way. Each role play would go down completely different channels and avenues since the interlocutors in those exam centers can give you different answers. So, if you answer the speaking exam exactly according to the provided bullet points, it would become unnatural. Therefore, you don’t need to follow it in the exact order listed.

Don’t be a robot!

You might, for instance, address the first two bullet points but then you miss out the third and fourth. You could just continue to the fifth and sixth questions. Although each bullet point tells you what to do such as: what the symptoms are, what to advise, reassure and recommend to the patient, you can just go back to the skipped questions later on. Those verbs are just doing words that are needed to be done as part of the examination. If you feel like you need to skip one, that’s absolutely fine. Just go back to it later on.

You don’t have to formulate your way out and be a robot because you’re an exam candidate. You have to reenact what a medical professional would do in that scenario in an English-speaking hospital.

Feedback is important

In fact, the consultations in the hospital don’t go in the same way every time as every patient is different. So that’s my quick tip for you today: you don’t have to follow the bullet points in the exact order because they’ll change according to the answers given to you by the interlocutor. If you’re just starting out on your journey with OET speaking, I highly recommend finding a native English speaking OET teacher to help you. If you can’t do that, then, at least, get a speaking study partner. This will help you because you can’t speak to the wall with the wall replying back to you. It’s good to keep practicing those scenarios but the best situation is to get a feedback as well.

I hope this article on OET speaking was helpful to you. If you have any questions, make sure you put them in the message box below and we’d be happy to help you.
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