OET: the test, in plain terms.
The Occupational English Test is the English test for healthcare: four sub-tests, each scored from 0 to 500, with the Grade B that most regulators ask for sitting at 350. Listening and Reading are the same for everyone. Writing and Speaking are specific to your profession, and they are marked by people, against published criteria, on how well you do the job in English. That last fact is why it is a different discipline from IELTS, and a more learnable one.
Read this first. Most of what this site teaches transfers straight into OET: the grammar, the vocabulary, the fluency, the pronunciation. What does not transfer is the craft of the two profession-specific sub-tests. A referral letter is not an essay, and a role-play with a patient is not a discussion about society. The English you need is Band 7 English; the rest is method, and method is teachable in weeks. I teach OET Speaking and Writing one to one, and everything below is what those lessons are built on. Every figure on this page is taken from the official test information, which is where the full descriptors live.
Four sub-tests, one day.
About three hours in total, at a venue on paper or computer, or from home. Listening, Reading and Writing run together; Speaking is a separate appointment with an interlocutor, recorded and marked afterwards.
Listening
About 40 minutes · 42 items · same for every profession
Part A: two consultations between a health professional and a patient, and you complete the notes as you listen. Part B: six short workplace extracts, one question each. Part C: two longer talks or interviews, six questions each. Everything is played once.
Part A is a note-completion task under time pressure: the words you write are the words you hear, in the form you hear them. The Listening page →
Reading
60 minutes · 42 items · same for every profession
Part A: fifteen minutes, four short texts on one topic, twenty quick-reference questions. Parts B and C: forty-five minutes together, six short workplace texts with one question each, then two long texts of around 800 words with eight questions each.
Part A is a speed test. It is finished by people who locate, not by people who read. The Reading page →
Writing
45 minutes · one letter · specific to your profession
Five minutes to read a set of case notes, forty to write a letter of 180 to 200 words from them. Usually a referral; sometimes a transfer or discharge letter, or a letter advising a patient or carer. Six criteria, two assessors.
The letter is marked on selection as much as on English. What you leave out is scored. The Writing page →
Speaking
About 20 minutes · two role-plays · specific to your profession
A short warm-up that is not assessed, then two role-plays of about five minutes each, with three minutes to prepare from a card. The interlocutor plays your patient, or a relative or carer, and you play yourself at work.
It is marked on the clinical conversation as well as the language. Rapport is a criterion. The Speaking page →
Every sub-test is scored from 0 to 500.
The number is what you receive; the letter is what your regulator reads. Grade B, from 350, is the line almost every regulator draws.
| Grade | Score | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| A | 450 to 500 | Very high performance. Rarely required, occasionally achieved by native speakers who have prepared. |
| B | 350 to 440 | High performance. The standard regulators ask for, in each of the four sub-tests. Read alongside IELTS 7.0 in the regulators' own equivalence tables. |
| C+ | 300 to 340 | Good performance. Some regulators, the NMC among them, accept it for Writing alone. Read alongside IELTS 6.5. |
| C, D, E | Below 300 | Below the professional threshold everywhere. Worth knowing where you sit; not worth a certificate. |
The regulators. The GMC, the NMC, AHPRA and their equivalents each publish their own requirements, and they differ on one detail that matters: whether you may combine two sittings. Some insist on all four grades from a single sitting; others accept results from two sittings within a set period. Check your regulator's page before you book, and book with that rule in front of you. The official results page carries the full grade table.
What transfers, and what does not.
If you prepared for IELTS, or used this site for it, most of your work carries over. The criteria have new names, not new content. The two exceptions are the ones that decide the profession-specific grades.
| In IELTS | In OET | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Grammatical range and accuracy, lexical resource | Language (Writing); Resources of grammar and expression (Speaking) | Transfers whole. Band 7 grammar is Grade B grammar. Every grammar page and vocabulary page here applies unchanged. |
| Fluency and pronunciation | Fluency; Intelligibility | Transfers whole. The word stress rules and the speaking formulas are as useful to a nurse as to a student. |
| Task response, the essay | Purpose, Content, Conciseness and Clarity, Genre and Style, Organisation and Layout | Does not transfer. Five of the six Writing criteria are about the letter as a professional document: choosing, ordering and framing, not arguing. New craft, learned fast. |
| The Part 3 discussion | The clinical communication criteria | Does not transfer. Nobody asks your opinion. You gather information, give it, structure the conversation and build a relationship with a person who is worried. That is a skill you already have at work; the test wants it in English. |
| Academic listening and reading | Healthcare listening and reading | Transfers mostly. The task types are familiar; the vocabulary is your own field, which is an advantage no other candidate group gets. |
The consequence. An IELTS 7 candidate is a Grade B candidate in Language already. What stands between them and the certificate is two documents' worth of craft: the letter and the role-play. Those are the two things I teach for OET, because they are the two things that move.
Six criteria, and what Grade B needs in each.
Purpose is scored out of 3; the other five out of 7. The official guidance puts Grade B at 2 of 3 for Purpose and 5 of 7 on each of the rest. Since 2024 the assessors have been noticeably stricter on Conciseness and Genre, so a letter that carries every case-note detail now scores lower than it did, not higher. The full method, a worked example and a marker for your own letter are on the Writing page; four further cases across medicine, physiotherapy, pharmacy and dentistry are on the practice page, and the writing checker has an OET letter mode of its own.
Purpose
Is the reason for writing immediately clear?
The reader should know within the first two lines who the patient is and what you want done. Purpose is not stated at the end; it opens the letter.
The habit: first sentence, patient and request. Everything else follows.
Content
Is the necessary information there, and accurate?
Necessary means necessary for the reader to act. The case notes contain more than the reader needs, on purpose. Selection is the skill being marked.
The habit: before writing, mark each case-note line as must, may or leave. Only the first group is guaranteed a place.
Conciseness and clarity
Is the unnecessary left out?
Every irrelevant detail costs twice: once here, once in the reader's time. 180 to 200 words is not a target to fill; it is a ceiling that a well-selected letter fits under naturally.
The habit: if a detail does not change what the reader will do, it goes.
Genre and style
Right register, right tone, right abbreviations?
A letter to a consultant and a letter to a patient's daughter are different documents. Abbreviations that are standard between professionals are wrong to a carer. Case-note shorthand is wrong to everyone.
The habit: name the reader before the first sentence, and write to that person.
Organisation and layout
Does it read in the order a reader needs?
Purpose, then the relevant history in the order that explains the request, then what you are asking for and by when. Paragraphs by topic, not by case-note line.
The habit: one paragraph, one job. A paragraph that does two jobs is two paragraphs.
Language
Grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation
The one criterion that is pure IELTS. Frequent error-free sentences, controlled complex structures, correct spelling of the terms of your own profession, which the assessors will notice first.
The habit from the grammar pages: shorten the sentence until it is right, then extend it.
Two families of criteria, marked on the same five minutes.
The assessors listen to the recording twice, in effect: once for the English and once for the clinical conversation. Candidates with good English fail on the second listen, because nobody told them it existed. Both sets of criteria, a phrase bank for each and a worked opening are on the Speaking page; twelve original cards with a partner's brief and a self-marking sheet are in the role-play deck, which also reads a transcript of your run against the clinical criteria.
The linguistic criteria
Intelligibility · Fluency · Appropriateness of language · Resources of grammar and expression
These are the IELTS Speaking criteria under other names, and everything on the Speaking pages applies. Appropriateness adds one thing: plain English to a patient, professional English to a colleague, and the judgement to know which the card is asking for.
The habit: explain the medical word the moment you use it, in one plain clause, every time.
The clinical communication criteria
Relationship building · Understanding and incorporating the patient's perspective · Providing structure · Information gathering · Information giving
Five things a good clinician does in any consultation, scored in English. Greet and reassure; find out what the patient thinks and fears and use it; signpost what will happen next; ask open questions before closed ones; check understanding after you explain.
The habit: the card tells you what the patient is worried about. Say it back to them, in your first minute, before you give a single instruction.
The three minutes
Preparation is assessed by its results
Read the card for the patient's concern, the two or three things you must find out, and the two or three things you must get across. Write those five lines down. A role-play that covers them in order, with the patient's worry acknowledged first, is a Grade B role-play.
The habit: never open with information. Open with a question about how they are feeling.
Priorities, if the test is soon.
The two profession-specific sub-tests are the two that move fastest, because they reward craft, and craft is what a few weeks can buy.
The letter, first
One letter a day, marked against the six criteria
The most rule-bound task in the whole test, and the one where the stricter marking since 2024 punishes the untrained habit of including everything. A week of selection practice is worth a month of grammar revision.
Write the purpose line before anything else. Then mark the case notes: must, may, leave. Write one and have it read → Then four more cases, marked →
The role-plays, aloud, with a partner
A colleague as the patient, a phone as the recorder
Silent preparation does nothing for this sub-test. Run a card, record it, listen back for the five clinical criteria in order, then run it again.
Listen for the first thirty seconds. If you gave information before you asked a question, start over. Twelve cards to run →
Listening Part A, daily
Note completion at speed
Twenty-four of the forty-two items sit in Part A, and they reward exactly one habit: writing what you hear as you hear it, in the words used. The Listening page has a consultation to run with a partner and the thirty-second method that wins the gaps. Any recorded consultation in English will do for practice.
The listening builder here takes any video and its subtitle file and turns it into a gap-fill exercise from that exact recording.
Reading Part A, against the clock
Fifteen minutes, twenty questions, four texts
A locating task, not a reading task. Practise finding the text that holds the answer before you read a word of it. Candidates who read Part A properly do not finish it.
Question first, then the text, then the line. Never the other way round. A timed Part A drill →
Twelve professions, two of the four sub-tests.
OET is set for medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, veterinary science, dietetics, optometry, podiatry, radiography and speech pathology. Listening and Reading are common to all twelve. Writing and Speaking are set for your own profession, so a nurse writes a nurse's letter and plays a nurse's role-plays, and a vet's patient is an animal's owner.
What that means for preparation. Practise the letter and the role-plays only in your own profession's materials. The criteria are identical across the twelve; the case notes, the readers and the conversations are not, and the vocabulary you are marked on is the vocabulary of your own ward or clinic.
The English is Band 7. The rest is craft, and craft is taught.
One-to-one OET lessons work on the two sub-tests that move: a letter of yours marked against the six criteria with the selection explained line by line, and a role-play run live with me as the patient, then marked against all nine.
Lessons are £20 for fifty minutes, one to one with a native British tutor, with a written report after each. The first lesson doubles as a full assessment of where your letter and your role-play actually sit against Grade B. For the English underneath, the grammar pages, the vocabulary bank and the practice tools are free and apply unchanged.