Medicine - work experience ideas

Hospice Volunteering
Hospices provide care for patients who are terminally ill. Many hospices rely heavily on volunteers to help with their work. This might involve helping with meal times, patient transport or day trips.
Health Care Assistant
There are also several paid jobs that you can do that don't require much prior training or experience. For example, you can work as a health care assistant (HCA), support worker, phlebotomist or hospital porter, all of which will give you excellent experience working with patients. Getting this type of job is particularly useful if you are taking a gap year (and you don't want to go abroad) or if you are going into medicine as a mature student. You can also work part time in many of these jobs. To get this type of work, look in the local paper, contact your local hospital, look for local nursing agencies or try the NHS jobs site.
Caring For Elderly
Caring for the elderly is also excellent experience for would-be doctors. This can often be challenging, as you may need to deal with patients with dementia, hearing loss and physical disability. The best way to search for this type of voluntary work is to look for your local nursing home or rest home and write to them, explaining why you would like to volunteer. Try the yellow pages website as a starting point
Counselling
There are lots of opportunities to work with organisations providing telephone counselling and support. Examples include Childline, who help children in distress, The Samaritans who offer support to adults in crisis and Saneline, who offer advice and counselling to people affected by mental illness.
Working With Children
Working with children is another way to gain relevant experience for medical school. Learning how to communicate with kids is really useful, particularly if you are interested in being a GP or paediatrician. There are a number of ways to get involved; Barnados play schemes, Over the Wall and Camp activity all run activity weeks for kids with serious illness. Working or volunteering with children and vulnerable adults in the UK is likely to involve you undergoing some form of personal screening.
Also try The Red Cross and St John’s Ambulance as well as local charity shops or youth centres. If you can obtain work over a consistent period of time (e.g. one afternoon for 6 months), this looks better than a week done in the holidays. This demonstrates commitment, interest and effort. Any type of volunteering will be beneficial. Participatory work experience (i.e. hands on rather than just observing) is the most valuable.
Here is a selection of volunteering sites that may help you:

• Do it!
• Community Service Volunteers
• Volunteer Development Scotland
• Wales Council for Voluntary Action
• Volunteer Development Agency, Northern Ireland
• Timebank
• Hospice volunteering
• St. John's Ambulance volunteering
• Camp Quality UK

Courses
There are also courses that you can attend, some run by the hospitals themselves. E.g. Royal Berkshire NHS trust runs ‘Introduction to Medicine’ course, Imperial run ‘The Premed Course’ and The Royal Orthopaedic Hospital runs ‘So You Want to do Medicine?’ There are also external organisations (chargeable) that run similar events eg Medi-quest and mdexperience.co.uk. The Debate Chamber runs The Medicine Summer School, 3 days at London University. (cost is £250) covers subjects such as Neurology, cardiology, trauma, radiology, haematology, pulmonary and ethics.
Work Experience - Dental Students
With regard dentistry, you generally need at least 2 weeks work experience in a dental surgery. You should approach the following and endeavour to get a mix of work experience. Contact as many as you can in order to secure some work placements.

Contact as many as you can in order to secure some work placements:

• NHS general practice
• Private general practice
• Community general practice (SPDCS)
• Dental school/hospital
• Maxillofacial department
• Orthodontist

Work Placement Abroad
A number of organisations organise placements abroad for sixth form students interested in studying medicine or dentistry. These are charged for and you can choose for how long you stay. They are anything from 1 week to 3 months. You will get a first hand experience of working in a hospital or with patients.
Here is a selection:

• Gap Medics – offers placements working in a hospital shadowing doctors or dentists in India, Tanzania, Thailand and St Lucia in Caribbean
• Global volunteer projects and global medical projects– offers placements in hospitals in India, Cambodia, China, Ghana, Mexico and Tanzania
• Projects Abroad – work in hospitals in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Ghana, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, Peru, Romania, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Togo
• Learn Overseas – 2 week work experience in Delhi
• Gap Guru – medical internships in India, Cambodia, Nepal and Romania. Aimed mainly at students taking a gap year.
• Travellers Worldwide – in Nepal they offer dentistry internships
• Latitude Global Volunteering – has links with British Red Cross Hospitals in Japan where roles such as care assistants and medical assistants are available
• Project Trust - get involved with their social care programmes – looking after neglected or orphaned children in care homes. Opportunities are available in Africa, America and Asia.