ESL Doctors Writing

Learning vocabulary is important and doing these ESL doctors writing exercises is one way for you to practice the use of the vocabulary you have learnt related to doctors and visiting them for an appointment.

Doing the exercises on this page and trying hard to use as much of the new doctors vocabulary you have learnt will help you become better at English. Learning English is all about practice, and doing these tasks will let you practice.

By practicing ESL doctors writing you will be better prepared to talk to a doctor if you become ill when abroad.

There are 4 ESL doctors writing exercises on this page as follows:

  • Writing an essay or short passage from some writing topics.
  • Reading a passage and then writing your own summary.
  • Writing a description of some data.
  • Writing a role-play about a given situation.

ESL Doctors Writing Exercises

Exercise 1 – Writing topics

Look at the following topics and then choose one of them (or more, you can do all of them if you want) to do. Write as much as you can, possibly either just a short paragraph or a full essay. Whichever you choose, try to use as much of the new vocabulary you have learnt as possible.

  • Discuss why it is important to visit a doctor for regular health checks.
  • Explain what happened the last time you visited a doctor.
  • Is it important for doctors to have a good way of speaking to and interacting with patients?

Exercise 2 – Write a Summary

Below is a passage about “Visiting a Surgery” and what a community’s health centre might be like. Read the passage and then try to write a summary of it. That is you should try to describe all the information the passage contains while trying to use new words that are not part of the original.

Visiting a Surgery

Most towns and communities will have a GP surgery or doctor’s practice. These are vital parts of the community as they enable the local people to have access to medical care without needing to go to a hospital, which might be much further away. They are very important for old people and families with small children, who cannot travel very far to a hospital.

In most GP surgeries there will be several General Practitioners working. This means that the patients do not have to wait too long as there will hopefully be a doctor free to see them, as well as meaning that there is a doctor at work or on-all all the time to see patient who have a more serious illness. Depending on the situation a patient might only see one of the doctors or several of the GPs might treat them.

When a patient first goes to the health center they will have to go to the reception desk and speak to the receptionist. This is the person who answers the telephone and organizes the appointments with the doctors. Once they know that the patient has arrived for their appointment, the patient will be told to wait in the waiting room. This is a room with chairs for people to sit on and some magazines for them to read.

When the doctor is ready to see a patient the receptionist will call the patient's name and tell them the room number of the doctor that will be seeing them. There will be several consulting rooms for the doctors to use when examining patients. There will also be some treatment rooms where the doctors will be able to perform minor surgeries that do not require the patient to travel to a hospital. The surgery does not have facilities for patient who need to stay overnight and receive twenty-four hour care.

Exercise 3 – Describe Data

In this ESL doctors writing task you need to look at the following information. The first figure shows the number of patients that saw a doctor divided into different age groups, and the second shows the average time that the members of each age group spent with the doctor. Write a description of the data from the two figures.

Exercise 4 – Writing Role-plays

You have been given two role-play situations liked to ESL doctors writing and you need to write the dialogue that each of the participants would say. Try to use as much of the new doctors vocabulary that you have learnt as possible.

Role-play 1

  • Participants: Doctor, Mother, Daughter (age 5 years old)
  • Location: Patients house
  • Situation: Doctor makes a house call and has to diagnose what is wrong with the little girl.

Role-play 2

  • Participants: Chemist, patient
  • Location: Chemist’s shop
  • Situation: The patient has come for some medicine with a prescription, but the chemist cannot read the doctor’s handwriting.




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