Speaking Part 2 · PeopleIn the Sep–Dec 2026 reported set
Describe a Person You Know Who Works in the Medical Field
In short
“Describe a Person You Know Who Works in the Medical Field” is a common IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card. You get 1 minute to prepare and should speak for 1–2 minutes, covering all four points below. This page gives you a Band 9 model answer, an idea map so you can make it your own, the Part 3 follow-up questions with answers, and the vocabulary examiners reward.
The task card
Describe a Person You Know Who Works in the Medical Field. You should say:
- •Who this person is
- •What they do
- •Why they chose this career
- •And explain how you feel about their work
Band 9 model answer
The person I'd like to talk about is my cousin Nadia, who qualified as a nurse about six years ago and now works in the intensive care unit of a large public hospital. I've chosen her rather than a doctor deliberately, because I think nurses do an enormous amount of the actual caring and get a fraction of the credit for it.
Her job is far more demanding than most people imagine. She works twelve-hour shifts, rotating between days and nights, and in intensive care she's typically responsible for only one or two patients at a time — but they're the ones whose condition can turn in minutes. So it's not a case of doing rounds and moving on; she's monitoring ventilators, adjusting medication, spotting deterioration before it becomes a crisis. She once told me the skill nobody trains you for is reading a family's face and knowing how much they're ready to hear.
As for why she went into it, the honest answer is that it wasn't some lifelong calling. She'd been studying biology and was fairly undecided, and then our grandmother spent several months in hospital when Nadia was nineteen. She spent a lot of that time on the ward, and she said what struck her wasn't the medicine — it was that the good nurses made a frightening place feel manageable. That was what she wanted to be able to do. I find that more convincing, actually, than the people who say they knew at the age of five.
How I feel about it is complicated, and I'd be lying if I said it was pure admiration. I do admire her, enormously — she's calm in situations that would leave me useless, and she carries responsibility I can barely imagine without ever making a performance of it. But I also see the cost. She's come to family dinners visibly exhausted, and she's lost patients she'd looked after for weeks and then gone straight back in the next morning. There's a quiet toll to that which she doesn't talk about much.
What I find most impressive is that she's never sentimental about it. When people call her a hero she gets genuinely irritated — she says it's a job, she's paid to do it, and calling it heroism is how societies justify not paying nurses properly. I think there's something in that.
So I suppose my honest feeling is a mixture of real respect and a bit of worry. I'm glad people like her exist, because I'd want her looking after someone I love. I just wish the job asked slightly less of them than it does.
Make it your own: three angles
A nurse or paramedic rather than a doctor
Less predictable than the doctor answer, and the daily detail is more vivid. It also opens an easy Part 3 line about who gets recognised in healthcare.
A family member studying medicine
Good if you can describe the sheer length and cost of the training — useful for future forms and for talking about pressure and sacrifice.
A specialist you have met as a patient
Works when you have a real encounter to narrate. Anchor it to one appointment rather than trying to describe the whole profession.
What the examiner is listening for
The 'why they chose it' bullet is where most candidates go generic — 'because they want to help people' says nothing. A specific origin story, as in the model, is worth more than any amount of praise. Note too that the strongest answers give a MIXED feeling on the final bullet: admiration plus a real reservation shows you can qualify an opinion, which is exactly what Part 3 will demand.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- Is medicine a popular career choice where you live?
- Did you ever want to be a doctor when you were younger?
- Do you go to the doctor often?
- Do you think health is talked about more now than in the past?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
Why do people choose careers in medicine?
There's a mix of motives and I think it's worth being honest about all of them. Some people are drawn by the chance to do work that visibly matters, which is rarer than it sounds. Others are attracted by the security and the status — medicine is one of the few fields where a qualification still guarantees a career. And a lot of people, like my cousin, come to it through a personal experience with illness rather than any grand plan.
Are doctors paid enough in your country?
Doctors are generally paid reasonably, though usually far less than the private sector would pay someone with that much training. The bigger problem is further down — nurses, paramedics and care staff are paid poorly relative to the responsibility they carry, and that shows up as chronic understaffing. Pay isn't really about fairness at that point; it's about whether the system can keep anyone in the job.
Should healthcare be free for everyone?
I'd argue yes, at least for essential care, because otherwise people delay treatment until a cheap problem has become an expensive one, which costs the system more in the end. It's also a question of what kind of society you want — nobody chooses to be born with a condition. The honest difficulty is that free care means rationing by waiting time instead of by price, and that has real costs of its own.
How has technology changed medicine?
Enormously, in ways that aren't only about equipment. Imaging and diagnostics have got dramatically better, so conditions get caught earlier. Records being digital means a doctor who has never met you can see your history. And remote consultations have made routine care far more accessible for people in rural areas. The trade-off is that medicine has become more mediated by screens, and something is lost when a doctor is looking at a monitor rather than at you.
Do you think artificial intelligence could replace doctors?
It could replace parts of the job — pattern recognition in scans, for instance, is something machines are already very good at, and probably better than a tired human at the end of a shift. What I can't see it replacing is the judgement about a specific person with a specific life, or the conversation where you tell someone bad news. So I'd expect it to change what doctors spend their time on rather than remove the need for them.
Is it harder to be a medical worker now than in the past?
In some ways it's easier — the tools are better and you can cure things that were death sentences a generation ago. But the pressure is higher. Patient expectations have risen, systems are stretched, and there's a level of scrutiny and litigation that didn't exist before. I'd say the medicine has got better and the working conditions have got worse, which is an uncomfortable combination.
Should young people be encouraged to work in healthcare?
They should be given an honest picture, which isn't quite the same thing. Encouraging people into a profession while hiding the shift patterns and the emotional cost is how you get high dropout rates a few years in. If the conditions were better the encouragement wouldn't be necessary — the work itself is genuinely meaningful, and people are drawn to that when it's sustainable.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| to qualify as | to complete the training to become something |
| a calling | work you feel strongly drawn to do |
| bedside manner | how well a medical worker deals with patients' feelings |
| to be on call | to be available to work at short notice |
| a shift pattern | the arrangement of working hours |
| to take its toll | to cause gradual harm or exhaustion |
| understaffed | not having enough workers |
| to make a difference | to have a real positive effect |
| burnout | exhaustion caused by long-term stress at work |
| frontline | dealing directly with the people who need help |
More cue cards
Describe a Person Who Helped You
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