How to get medical work experience

Work experience is a key part of the application to medical school. It shows the medical school that you have taken measures to find out more about your future career, and is a good way to make your personal statement stand out. We recommend that you dedicate an entire section to this in your personal statement, which you can read more about here alongside other helpful advice to make yours stand out from the rest. Not only that, but its always a good idea to draw on your observations and reflections from work experience to answer questions during interview.

When considering work experience, we can split placements into two broad categories: clinical work experience and long term volunteering. Read on to find out more about these two types of placements.

Clinical work experience

This can refer to any shadowing experience you gain on medical wards in a hospital or another setting - such as general practice or community psychiatry. These are often very difficult to set up if you do not have any family or friends as contacts in the respective areas, and medical schools recognise this. This means you don’t at all need to stress about lining up placements in various different specialities across your time in sixth form or college. Often, even one clinical placement is enough.

During a clinical work experience, we think you should focus on the role that a doctor or another healthcare professional plays in the clinical environment. Think about what skills they display and the challenges they overcome and how. This is not to say that you should ignore the patient's perspective, as many important insights can be gained from listening to patient stories.

As we said before, setting up a clinical work experience placement can be quite tricky. It might be helpful to talk with senior students at your college/sixth form to see if they know of any sites in your area that are happy to offer work experience to students. The staff at your sixth form or college may also be able to offer you help with this. You should also be reaching out to as many places as possible. Access the websites of hospitals and GPs and look for an email you can contact. Try and draft an email introducing yourself and asking if they are happy to have you as a student on work experience. Send this email to sites around your area, but prepare for rejection too.

Long term volunteering

It's important to know that the admissions board of medical schools know how challenging it is to sort short term clinical work experience. However, volunteering is highly accessible for everyone, so there are few excuses to not have at least some kind of volunteering on your application. Long-term volunteering is important because it shows a desire to have a positive impact on your local community and shows commitment to studying medicine. This is normally undertaken in a hospital ward, volunteering generally in the hospital (e.g directing visitors), or in a care home of some kind. Non-clinical volunteering, such as working with children in a local group, is beneficial if you can't find any clinical experience. However, clinical experience will lead to a stronger application. NCS and Duke of Edinburgh have a volunteering component so these are often good extracurriculars to do to prepare for medicine.

Some specific suggestions about where to find longer-term volunteering are:

• Apply to your local hospital as a 'befriender' - someone who chats to lonely patients on the hospital ward

• Apply to your local care home to volunteer by providing drinks/chatting with residents

• Apply to a hospice to chat with the patients and families and provide emotional support for them.

• Apply to your local hospital and help to make sure people can find the right hospital wards to get to and find their way around the hospital.

Non-clinical examples include:

• Mentorship schemes where you are partnered with a younger student over a year

• Free tutoring schemes for younger students (long-term)

• Volunteering with children in a local youth group/church group/other faith youth group

• Volunteering in a charity shop or library over the course of a year

To conclude, it's worth mentioning that the value of any work experience placement is dependent on what you make out of it. What you observe and your reflections are what will make your application stand out from the others.

Thank you for reading this article! If you have any suggestions on how we might improve, or any questions, please get in contact!