This article reconstructs the background to the development of ForWard, a film about medical emergencies shot in a real hospital using professional actors whose mother tongue is not English. By foregrounding interactional skills in Medical English, the film is designed to respond to a new challenge: the Ordinamento 270/04 which radically changes and improves the status of medical English.Vis-à-vis previous legislation, the degree in Medicine and Surgery now provides for a large quantitative increase in English that responds to a better vision of the global picture and a greater awareness of the interdisciplinary nature of medicine, a strategic objective that underpins the CCLM syllabus. English no longer responds only as it has done in the past to the logic of the European Union’s recognition of the transferability of medical degrees within the Member States. Instead – like the entire degree course – it is being called upon to respond to the logic of the Global minimum essential requirements in medical education (GMER) developed by the Institute for International Medical Education (IIME: http://www.iime.org/index.htm) which at the turn of the millennium came to recognize the urgency in the training process of responding to the demands of globalization and global essential competencies required by global physicians. Guided by this principle, the IIME Core Committee developed the GMER concept and defined a set of global minimum learning outcomes, which students of medical schools throughout the world must demonstrate on graduation. The Essentials are grouped under seven broad educational domains. The consequences of this new scenario for Medical English are explored in the article.

Medical communication is a complex process which calls for close investigation and analysis if it is to provide a more comprehensive outline of the social, linguistic and semiotic aspects that interact in the process itself: the complexity of this process transcends the ideational, interpersonal and textual variables that manifest themselves in any interactional medical event. The volume thus focuses on events which might serve as paradigmatic examples of how medical communication evolves, codifies, and takes on the modern forms we use nowadays (Chapter 1); furthermore, it is designed to analyse some events in which medical communication becomes codified and turned into a system of communication (Chapter 2); the volume finally explores possible textual representations in which medical communication reveals recognizable forms and features that are evolving into new genres and hybrid forms (Chapter 3).