The team of experts at Crystal Clear Language have built the programme based on decades of working with IMGs. They come from education, NHS and independent healthcare backgrounds; teaching, providing clinical care, managing teams and services and senior leadership roles. The team is committed to improving the working lives of IMGs; safe, effective communication ensures safe, effective team work and safe effective care for patients.

International medical graduates have been part of the NHS workforce since its inception. Without IMGs, the NHS would not have grown, innovated and served the population as well as it does now.

The NHS is going to rely on IMGs as never before and how they are inducted, integrated and supported matters as never before. Leaving your home, family, culture, language, to come to the UK, is not an easy decision. The reasons for leaving are many; opportunity to learn from a modern healthcare system; use knowledge and skills not possible back home; improving one’s quality of life especially when moving from a lower income nations.

Having worked with doctors over three decades to support them out of difficulty, to enable good career outcomes, it was clear that for some of my IMG colleagues, language, culture and communication, addressed late, had become barriers to effective working and career fulfilment.
The knowledge of medicine, and the capability to deliver that knowledge are rarely the issues that cause the greatest challenges to IMGs. The greatest challenge is the culture shock – what they see, feel, hear, and even smell. How to navigate safely is hard work, and Crystal Clear Language will help.

The commonest cause for colleagues and patients raising concerns, complaints or worse, in clinical teams, when looking after patients, working with families and carers, is communication. What is said is rarely the issue. How it is said, and how it lands and tested matters most. Language that is understood easily; in the right cultural context and nuances; communication that ensures shared understanding, effective partnership, and safe care.

It is the duty of every employer taking on IMGs to ensure the right support, before they cross the threshold. Ensuring language, culture and communication skills are tested, improved and supported through out are the duty of the employer to provide, and the duty of the IMG employee to constantly work on. Crystal Clear Language helps the employer and employee ensure that safe start in the NHS.

Dr Nadeem Moghal
MBChB BAO (MRCP) FRCPH MBA FRCPI (Hon.)
Chief Executive
DMC Healthcare