I know how hard it is to get medical work experience. It feels like a huge challenge even in normal times so times that by 1000 and you get how it feels during a pandemic!
It can be a challenge to know what makes a good work experience for aspiring medics and what isn’t so good. Today I will be sharing 7 amazing ideas for getting brilliant work experience.
For even more tips and advice on gaining work experience check out the posts below!
1. Reading to residents in a care home.
This is a great way to get involved in your local community and serve a vulnerable population. Try finding an elderly person home, or another centre where you could offer a service. It doesn’t have to be reading! If you play the piano, ask if you could do that or just volunteer to have a chat with the residents!
So much medical care goes on outside of the hospitals and in the community, health and social care are completely intertwined. Volunteering in a setting like this gives you an unmatched opportunity to see how the staff, nurses and carers work. Not to mention, speaking with elderly people will give you a lifetime of insight!
2. Work experience in another type of allied health facility
Even if you want to be a doctor, medical work experience can be found in other environments too!
Many of the professionals working in the vets, opticians and dentists play similar roles to doctors! Also observing the wider healthcare professionals can help you to understand the importance of the multidisciplinary team.
I did work experience in the optometrist and the vets and they actually allowed me to scrub into multiple surgeries! That’s an experience you wouldn’t normally get at the hospital!
3. Telephone befriending
This is an Idea that I always talk about! Telephone befriending is a type of volunteering where you have put in contact with a vulnerable/elderly person in your community and given the responsibility of calling them once a week.
It is an excellent way to build relationships with people, learn communication skills and improve your application.
Although it isn’t the traditional medical work experience, it’s a really good way to build up skills that demonstrate how you would talk to patients and show you are caring!
There are many organisations that you can get involved with, the most well-known one is probably Age UK
4. The non-clinical hospital experiences.
This is another type of medical work experience that I have done and really benefited from! There are so many roles within the hospital from porter, to receptionist to Nurse. Even in normal times, getting clinical work experience at 17-18 can be difficult.
The good news is that there are a ton of volunteering opportunities within the hospital that you could get stuck into. One example is bed befriending! This is a system that most hospitals have where volunteers go around the wards and make friends with the patients!
It’s a fantastic way to be involved in a clinical setting, and actually have a part to play in making the patients happier and healthier!
To find out if this is something you can be involved with, check out your local NHS hospital Trust.
5. Online work experiences
Last year, two new online work experiences were released to help support applying medics in getting clinical exposure.
These are Brighton and Sussex medical school (BSMS) ‘virtual work experience’, and the Royal College of General Practitioners ‘Observe GP’ work experience.
These programmes were a raging success with thousands of students signing up! I genuinely believe that there is not much excuse for not completing these as they are free and easily accessed!
The BSMS work experience was very reading heavy and it helps students to understand the different wards within a hospital and gain some useful clinical language. The information I learnt during this programme really helped me to show off my wider reading at the interview and sound much more informed.
On the other hand, the ‘Observe GP’ experience was very clinically focused. The programme is very interactive and involves a series of mock GP consultations for you to observe and reflect on.
Both of these are great tools for reflection and gaining insight into a clinical environment from home.
6. Interviewing Healthcare professionals!
This is an excellent way to get insight into different clinical careers. In contrast to the limited time you have to talk with doctors on the face to face medical work experience, you can arrange to sit down for an hour with an HCP and pick their brains!
This is something that I did over the first lockdown, I gained so much insight and was able to constantly refer back to these discussions at the interview!
If you are struggling to find any healthcare professionals to interview, check out these blog posts! They are the word-for-word accounts of the conversations I had and include reflective prompts for you too!
7. Volunteer for health charities!
There are so many charities that support everyone from palliative care patients to children with cancer. One thing is for certain is that they are always in need of more funding and support.
How about finding a way to raise some money for one of these charities? You could organise a quiz, or an online craft sale even!
This is a great medical work experience as not only will you raise awareness for the charities but learn valued skills like organisation and leadership.
If you build a good relationship with the charity they may even allow you to visit the centre at some point to see what they do and learn about the care they provide. You could even pair ideas 6 and 7 together and ask to interview one of their staff over the phone!
Being kind and courteous goes a long way, ask nicely and you may be surprised at what they offer you!
I hope that this has given you a few great ideas to run with. Also, remember as I always say it’s not about what you do, but how you reflect on it that counts.
Make the most of every small opportunity and you will be surprised with the insight and experience you gain.
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