English Language and the Medical Profession: Instructing and Assessing the Communication Skills of International Physicians is designed for a new context for English language teaching: the emerging, worldwide interest in English for medicine. The book offers a program for an English language curriculum that is specifically designed for the important and growing group of international medical professionals, with a focus on both instruction and assessment. International physicians in the United States now total more than 25 per cent of the physician workforce. Even subsequent to their passage of the clinical skills exam required for licensing and practice as physicians in U.S. hospitals, international physicians face communication challenges as first-year residents and may be referred to specialists for language and cultural issues. Advanced residents may face additional issues when they begin work as independent practitioners. This volume goes beyond existing texts in collecting the expertise of English language teaching and testing experts, medical residency supervisors, medical licensing, and exchange agencies in examining issues related to international physicians' performance as graduate students and doctors in hospitals and other settings. The contributors include specialists at the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates and doctors who supervise international medical residents as well as recognized ESP practitioners.

This textbook offers a comprehensive analysis of medical decision-making under uncertainty by combining test information theory with expected utility theory. The authors show how the parameters of Bayes’ theorem can be combined with a value function of health states in order to arrive at informed test and treatment decisions in the face of diagnostic and therapeutic risks. Distinguishing between risk-neutral, risk-averse, and prudent decision-makers, they demonstrate the effects of risk preferences on medical decisions. Furthermore, they analyze individual and multiple tests as well as diagnostic models in which the decision-maker chooses the test outcome. The consequences of test and treatment decisions for the patient are encompassed by quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and the standard economic model, which applies the willingness to pay for health approach. Lastly, non-expected utility models of choice under risk and uncertainty are presented. Although these models can explain some of the test and treatment decisions observed, they are less suitable for normative analyses aimed at providing guidance on medical decision-making. This third edition provides extensively revised versions of all chapters and reflects recent innovations in medical decision-making such as decision curve analysis. New chapters focus on the health economics of and revealed preferences in medical decisions. The book is intended for students of (health) economics and medicine as well as for medical decision-makers and physicians dealing with uncertainty in their test and treatment decisions.