OET Medicine Speaking
The format
OET Medicine Speaking takes about 20 minutes: two role plays of five minutes each, with two to three minutes' preparation before each. You are the doctor; the interlocutor plays the patient, a relative or a carer. The card gives the setting, the background and the task you must complete by the end of the interview.
What is scored
Nine criteria: Relationship-building; Understanding and incorporating the patient's perspective; Providing structure; Information gathering; Information giving; Intelligibility; Fluency; Appropriateness of language; Resources of grammar and vocabulary. Only two are purely linguistic - the rest measure how you run the consultation.
Rules that decide marks
- Read the task line twice in preparation and note the two or three things that must be covered; working through them is what 'providing structure' means in practice.
- Open with an open question, not a checklist: 'What's brought you in today?' before 'Any fever? Any vomiting?'
- Chunk explanations and check understanding instead of delivering a monologue.
- Acknowledge emotional cues before returning to the clinical content.
- Keep register professional: no 'love' or 'mate', and no jargon the patient would not recognise.
Worked example
The card asks you to explain that the patient's HbA1c has risen and that her medication will change. A candidate who says 'Your HbA1c is 8.4, so I'm switching you to a GLP-1 agonist' loses marks on information giving and on incorporating the patient's perspective, because the patient cannot restate the plan. A scored version introduces the idea plainly ('a blood test that shows your average sugar over about three months'), gives the figure in context, pauses, then asks 'Can you tell me what you'll say to your husband about the change?' The reasoning: information giving is judged on whether the patient can follow and recall, not on whether the doctor said it.
Traps that cost marks
- Turning the role play into an interrogation, with no listening.
- Ignoring distress while finishing your own agenda.
- Dropping out of role when the patient is angry or tearful instead of naming the emotion.
- Accelerating under nerves, which depresses intelligibility and fluency scores together.