Applying to medicine: work experience?

[crackonson]

Hi. My DD wants to apply to medicine next year. This is not something out family have experience of and I'm not sure her school has any track record of advising medical applicants. I'm interested in whether applicants are managing to get work experience in these Covid times. Someone we know who is applying this year has struggled to get any. We've seen a part-time administrative hospital job that my DD could apply for, and a hospital receptionist job, and we're wondering if this sort of experience might help her application if she doesn't manage to get anything clinical.

Mine volunteered in the local care home for ex servicemen.

If you are in London, Kings Volunteers is a great scheme. DD volunteers at Kings Hospital in Denmark Hill for 4 hours each week as a patient befriender in the Dementia ward. She finds it very fulfilling and has met lots and lots of other prospective medics along the way through her work there.

Volunteers range from 16 to 86 years old. As it's such a popular scheme, you need to pass an interview to get onto the programme and then undertake several on line courses - which can take weeks, if not months to complete.

www.kch.nhs.uk/about/get-involved/volunteering

I would echo the other posters saying that not all work experience needs to be clinical/medicine related. DS used to volunteer at a special needs scouts group, and according to him that was the most useful to reflect back on. He did do clinical things too, but apparently they weren't as helpful.

I can't help thinking that working in a care home is likely to be much more useful than things like working with children - so much of medicine is dealing with the older generations, that some experience in working with them has to be useful.

That is exactly what the manager of my mum's sheltered housing said. Not everyone finds it easy to work with the elderly, and it is worth discovering this before embarking on a career in medicine.

Actually continuing on the theme, a lot of focus seems to be on ticking the boxes in order to be offered a place in medical school. It is equally important to be sure that you actually want to be a doctor. It is far from unknown for students to then arrive and find that medicine is not what they thought it would be.

Indeed I know a junior doctor in his late 20s going through some soul searching. I suspect he is the first in his family to go to University and was apparently steered into medicine by an enthusiastic teacher because he was capable of getting the grades. A decade later and a nomadic existence during F1/F2 followed by a sudden change of location as a promised job was cancelled because the hospital had run out of money, long hours and uncertainty about whether this is what he wants to do for the rest of his life.

Some early and proper interaction with potentially challenging patient demographics has to be useful. Plus a good look at alternative careers, to give a clarity as to why medicine is preferred.

Oh, well I have come across several junior doctors who gave up working as a doctor. None of them because of the actual "doctoring", patient interactions etc.
Some because of getting stuck in a dead end job, frustration of the non doctoring aspects etc