Hopefully, you will never need to use the vocabulary you will learn in this lesson! However, accidents do happen, so it’s important to know what to expect when you go see a doctor. Whether it’s at a hospital emergency room or a walk-in clinic, the vocabulary you will learn in this lesson will help you get through the process more easily. I will teach you how to describe your symptoms to the nurse so that you can get the help you need. You will also learn medical terms, such as ‘diagnosis’, ‘IV’, ‘dressing’, ‘operating theatre’, and more. Take the quiz on this lesson at
TRANSCRIPT
Hi. Welcome to engVid. I'm Adam. In today's video, I'm going to talk to you about going to a hospital or a clinic in an English-speaking country. Now, hopefully, you will never need to know any of the words in this video because nothing will happen to you; but life is life, things do happen, sometimes accidents happen, sometimes things occur unexpectedly, so you may need to go to a hospital or a clinic.
A hospital - big building, lots of doctors, lots of equipment. It has an emergency room or an emergency department. A clinic is more like a small doctor's office, and you can walk into... Go into a walk-in clinic, meaning you don't need an appointment. If you have something urgent and you need to speak to a doctor, then you can go here to take care of whatever it is.
Now, this is all assuming that you are ambulatory. Now, all of you know "ambulance"; an ambulance carries you to the hospital. If you are ambulatory, it means you don't need an ambulance; you can go on your own two feet. You are mobile, you can stand, you can take yourself to the doctor. Okay?
Now, I'm going to talk about this in two ways. First, I'm going to talk about the administrative aspect of going to the hospital, and then I'll talk about the medical aspect. Now, I'm assuming that if the situation is an emergency, someone will go with you. Now, it may be a friend of yours who's also not a native speaker, it may be a roommate, it may be a classmate from your English school. So, everybody should know this stuff; you may need to help somebody, somebody may need to help you. Again, hopefully not, but be prepared.
So, you're going to go into the hospital or the walk-in clinic and you're going to check in. Just like you check in at a hotel, you check in at a hospital. You will go and deal with the admitting staff. "Admitting" means they take you in; they admit you, they do all the paperwork, they get you set up or your friend set up to be taken care of. You will fill out a lot of forms; name, information, maybe medical history if that's what they need to know. If there's a situation that you've had in the past, they need to know this. You will fill out all this information, and they will start to process you. Excuse me. They will process you, and you're ready to go or your friend will be ready to go.
If you need an x-ray, they will schedule an x-ray to check if you have any broken bones anywhere in you. If you need something like an MRI or a CAT scan, where they do a full body diagnosis and look inside, that's not going to happen at the emergency room because there's always a line up for that. That's not emergency services; if you need it, they will schedule it for a week later-if you're lucky-a month later, etc.
Now, it's very important, if you're going to travel overseas, that you have insurance. This is something that you pay for that, if anything happens, all your medical expenses are given back to you. But check your policy. Your policy is the insurance that you signed for; that you paid for. It has all the different rules, it has all the different conditions - make sure you understand these very clearly because it happens often that somebody comes to Canada, or to the US, or to another country, they need to go to the hospital and then they get a bill. The hospital says: "Okay, here. You owe us $5,000."
Medical expenses can be very, very high, so you may have to pay upfront, meaning you have to pay at the hospital at the time for anything that they do to you. If you have to go to surgery, you may have to pay $50,000 or whatever the situation. So, be prepared to be able to pay upfront. Now, if you think: "Well, that's what insurance is for. Insurance will pay for all this stuff." Some policies, yes, will pay the hospital directly; some will not. Some will reimburse you. You will be reimbursed when you go home and fill out all the paperwork in your home country. So make sure you understand what's going on. If you get to the hospital and you don't have a credit card with you, you might be in some serious trouble; they might not let you leave the hospital until somebody comes and pays for you. Okay? So, this is all the administrative stuff. Now let's look at what actually happens, medically speaking; doctors, nurses, etc.[…]
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