ESL Unit on the Emergency Room

Literacy Minnesota has an intermediate ESL Curriculum Unit on the Emergency Room available. The goal of the curriculum is to educate students on the different types of medical care available including emergency departments, urgent care and primary care providers. The unit teaches students how to explain their ailments, make appointments and ensure their medical needs are being met appropriately.

The curriculum is based off of ECHO’s digital short video entitled “Understanding the Emergency Room.” This four-to-seven-minute video (length varies on language), available in English, Spanish, Hmong and Somali, educates viewers on: when and how to use the emergency room, the cost of using the emergency room, how doctors must respect a patient’s privacy, and where to go when medical problems are not life-threatening. The video also touches on the issues of insurance and culture and how they factor into an emergency room visit.

To request copies of this curriculum, please visit the Literacy Minnesota website. All the materials are available online. To order the corresponding DVD, please contact Joanna Olson at ECHO by emailing olson@echominnesota.org.

Free copies are available of the digital short videos on their own if you would like to distribute them to your students. To order DVD copies, please contact Joanna at ECHO by emailing olson@echominnesota.org. All four languages come on one disc as well as a compilation of the four languages into one 30-minute program with some extra content. Simply tell Joanna how many copies you want, where to mail them and what you intend to use the copies for (i.e. teaching the lesson in your classroom to 10 students or sending the 10 copies home with your 10 students to learn on their own, et cetera). This information is needed for ECHO’s tracking and reporting purposes for funders. 

For more information on other ECHO multilingual educational programs please visit www.echominnesota.org.