UrgentiAS, a lexical database for medical students in clinical placements

The UrgentiAS database was compiled to meet the needs of Dutch-speaking Belgian medical students attending classes of Medical English/French/Spanish to prepare for their clinical placements abroad. The database provides students with an easy-to-use multilingual medical lexicon, which can help them acquire the vocabulary needed for their placements in obstetrics/gynaecology, pediatrics and internal medicine. Its main purpose is to ensure that the representative vocabulary is presented and acquired in context, both semantically and syntactically. Our corpus analysis of both scientific and popular medical language use resulted in an online database (partially available on paper) consisting of terminology cards with associative contexts, to be used in a setting of blended learning.