Public sector: Nursing and care

Female, senior worker, blue uniform: Temperature?

Female, pale brown hair: Yeah.

Female, senior worker, blue uniform: Within normal range?

Female, pale brown hair: Yeah.

Female, senior worker, blue uniform: Numeracy and literacy skills in heath care generally is incredibly important.

All health care professionals, whatever situation they're in will be recording such aspects as temperatures and blood pressures, possibly weights and heights just to see how the patient's condition is at that particular time.

Female, blue hijab: You normally take a temperature of someone when they have a fever, infection.

Male, short dark hair, stripey top: An average person's temperature would be about 37 degrees Centigrade.

Sometimes we have to convert grams into milligrams so we have to know that there's a thousand milligrams in a gram.

Female, senior worker, blue uniform: We use a lot of charts for documenting certain things.

Female, dark hair, stripey uniform: The chart, I think, which is most commonly used within hospitals and medical environment is the line chart.

Male, short hair: Collecting data is a huge part of our jobs because we need to monitor a patient's progress over time.

Female, dark hair, earrings: We also used food charts for some patients.

You hae to document what the patient ate for their breakfast, lunch and supper and you do that every day.

Female, pale brown hair: So what I might do now is do your blood pressure, your vital signs, your temperature, your respiration rate and your pulse.

How does that sound?

Female, patient, dark hair: Okay, thank you.

Female, pale brown hair: Okay, there you go.

Female, senior worker, blue uniform: Communication skills are incredibly important in the health care profession.

We need to be very clear with what we're saying.

We shouldn't use technical jargon, it needs to be clear, accurate, fairly brief.

Female, pale brown hair: I'm just going to pop it into my chart now, okay?

Female, senior worker, blue uniform: Anybody who's thinking of entering the health care profession such as nursing, midwifery, residential homes, district nursing needs to be competent to a certain level in literacy, numeracy and computer skills.