Applicants to medical school are expected to have undertaken work experience in some capacity. Work experience can be, however, difficult to obtain in some circumstances. Volunteering can provide valuable experience for you when applying to medicine and it can give you something unique to talk about not only on your Personal Statement, but at interview as well.
In this guide, I will be talking about whether volunteering could work as work experience, as well as talk about all the experiences I had which I spoke about on my application both during the personal statement and the medical school interviews.
What Medical Volunteering Opportunities Are Available?
As you should probably know already medicine applicants are expected to complete relevant work experience to demonstrate their commitment to the field and their desire to learn more. However, the most desirable placements, like hospital placements and GP shadowing, are limited and highly competitive.
When you can’t get a spot doing something like this, what other options are there? One option is volunteering, which can be done in a variety of ways.
Types of Medical Volunteering
Considering the difficulty in obtaining placements in clinical settings shadowing doctors, there are a number of alternative places where you can volunteer which are relevant to your application:
- Care Homes
- Hospice
- Treatment Wards
- Medical Call Centres
- Specialist Charities
- Homeless Shelters
- On the wards as a Healthcare Assistant (HCA)
These environments can give you an insight into clinical environments and the work of nurses and allied health professionals, as well as patients. For example, volunteering at a care home or a hospice may involve chatting to residents or helping prepare their rooms so you can get an insight into what goes on in these settings.
Equally, volunteering on treatment wards, such as a chemotherapy wards, can give you the opportunity to talk to patients receiving treatment and talk to the professionals delivering the treatment. All of these opportunities are useful to discuss in your Personal Statement and interview.
However, while these offer some great learning opportunities and experiences, some applicants will have one question regarding all of this:
Is Volunteering Work Experience?
The short answer is, kind of?
The long answer is that it depends on what you’re doing as your “volunteering”. I believe a lot of skills you will learn in real life and from a job or a volunteering position will be highly transferable to the role of a doctor and vice versa.
But at the same time, I also do believe that there is something special about work experience and the idea of having it all together in front of you that makes it feel very different to everything else you may do.
I would say that volunteering would be considered as valuable as standard medical work experience based on these two conditions:
1️⃣ Your volunteering would fully involve patients and ideally doctors and nurses. In the sense that you are exposed to harsh realities of the job setting up your expectations not so glamorous of what the career would entail.
2️⃣ You are able to supplement that with at least a form of online work experience seeing things in a clinic or doing another form of volunteering where it will not seem like you’re trying to get a tick box filled.
If standard work experience is really not an option, these types of volunteering experiences will still be invaluable to your application and will normally count towards the requirements. In fact, I personally never had any actual work experience, so I want to tell you about the volunteering opportunities I did instead that helped me get my spit at medical school.
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Medical Volunteering Experiences
Next, I will discuss the volunteering experiences I went through before applying to medicine. I did these instead of standard work experience which meant I had to work a bit harder to get the same value as someone who may be shadowing a GP or working on a ward for 6 weeks.
Care Home Volunteering
I did roughly two hours of volunteering at a local care home every Thursday afternoon for about 5 or 6 weeks as part of a programme my school had arranged. I would personally say this was a good experience because it felt quite enjoyable to do.
My role was very much just companionship and that felt quite nice, I also loved the atmosphere of the home. As to what I learned tho, I think it’s a little difficult to actually pinpoint because I was purely there for companionship, although empathy played a big part in this when I saw the residents struggling.
I think the biggest thing I learned was probably the harsh realities of working in a healthcare industry where you can’t help everyone and inevitably you will have to leave things as they are. In this case, it was the fact that we have an ageing population in the UK and, with that being said, I would say empathy was the biggest thing I learned.
COVID Call Centre
During my gap year, I worked remotely at a call centre as part of the COVID vaccine campaign. My responsibilities included taking inbound calls from citizens, answering their questions about the vaccines, and booking their appointments.
This job provided a mixed experience for me. On one hand, I was learning valuable skills that felt very applicable to the role of a doctor. I was the first point of contact for citizens, which gave me a sense of leadership during the calls, and I worked closely with a team, all of which are important aspects of being a doctor.
However, the job also came with significant responsibilities. I was expected to look out for vulnerable patients, report any concerning cases, and document everything meticulously, as I would be held responsible if anything went wrong.
Additionally, real-world events directly impacted my job. For instance, if a new vaccine was announced, the following morning, there would be thousands of callers trying to reach the limited number of agents available. This was exhausting, as I often handled around 70 calls a day, repeating the same tasks and losing my voice by the end of the shift.
Despite these challenges, the skills I gained were invaluable. I learned the importance of empathy, especially in dealing with vulnerable populations and managing liability. I also developed skills in teamwork, leadership, and taking responsibility for my actions, all of which are crucial in the medical field.
COVID Steward Volunteering
I also did a few shifts volunteering as a Covid Steward Volunteer, for which I’d turn up at vaccination sites, take patients’ temperatures, hand out consent forms and accompany them to their designated rooms to receive their jabs.
For this position, I only did a handful of shifts. However, the things I learned seemed to be incredibly invaluable, because I was directly at a hospital/ GP, seeing exactly how the doctor and nurses would interact with the patients, even if it was on a surface level, I’d see exactly how the multidisciplinary team would work and involve the patient.
Medical Volunteering Advice
To end this guide, here are a few tips that I discovered while planning my own medical volunteering work experience.
➡️ Try to find standard work experience first. Reach out to local GPs and Hospitals near you to see if they have any work experience positions available, you could also ask if they have any paid positions available if you are on a gap year and have the time. This likely won’t be anything too exciting, but even helping with admin will offer valuable lessons and experience.
➡️ Check out Royal Voluntary Service. Hopefully, you could get a few volunteering shifts organised through this. Make sure they’re relevant to medicine though.
➡️ Some gyms and leisure centres offer first aid courses and things like Basic Life Support. These not only are incredibly valuable skills, but they also will help you get a job if you’re interested. They’re also interesting for you to talk about in interviews and Personal Statement.
➡️ To give yourself a helping hand when it comes to applying to medical school, it is a good idea to keep a reflective log of your experiences as a volunteer, or during your work experience in general. You should record what you find interesting, what you gain from the placement and what you were inspired to find more about. Reflection is a key attribute of medical students and doctors, and keeping such a log will help you get the most out of your experience and prepare for the application process as well as life throughout medical school.
That concludes my guide to volunteering for your medicine work experience. Depending on your interests and how you like to work, these experiences may seem boring or they may be more desirable. Either way, the important thing is that you get some kind of experience so that you can strengthen your application. Our Definitive Guide to Medical Work Experience will help you understand this more.
Remember that this is just one step of the med school application process, so check out our other guides to learn everything you need to know. For even more comprehensive support, our Medicine Mastery Bundle offers you everything you need to get your offer! Book a free consultation today to speak with our friendly team!
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