Parent's Guide: Medical Work Experience

How can I help my child with their work experience?

Searching for medical work experience is one of the first stages on your child’s journey to Medical School – and it can be a bit daunting!

While it’s important to ensure that your child contacts hospitals or GPs themselves, instead of you doing it for them, there are several ways you can support them when they are looking.

Make use of any contacts you might have

Do you know anybody who works in Medicine? They don’t necessarily need to be a Doctor, as work experience in different areas of healthcare can also be useful for a medical application.

If you know someone, would they potentially be able to help your child get a work experience placement? Talk to them about how your child wants to get into Medicine and see if they can help out.

Encourage your child to be persistent

Looking for medical work experience can be difficult and time-consuming, so your support is incredibly important. Many hospital departments are very busy and get a lot of requests, so encourage your child not to feel disheartened if they can’t find a placement straight away.

Perhaps set aside some time when you can sit down together and create a list of local hospitals, surgeries, care homes and other relevant places with their contact details. This will help your child to keep on top of who they have already contacted and the responses they received.

Help them to plan the practicalities

A good way of helping your child to prepare for their work experience is by helping them with the logistics of it.

Could you realistically drive them to and from their placement? If they’ll need to take public transport to get there, could you look at the timetable with them and help to plan their route?

Encourage them to keep a record of their experiences

Once they’ve secured a placement, it’s important that your child keeps a work experience diary. This will help them later in the application process when they are writing their Personal Statement and preparing for Medical School interviews.

Encourage them to take some notes every day, building up a record of what they did and what they observed. They will be able to use these notes to look back on the experience and reflect on the key things they learned.

Talk to them about their placement

This is great interview preparation because it will help your child to become comfortable talking about their work experience.

In addition to making sure they keep a written record of their placement, encourage your child to talk to you about what they’re enjoying, what they’re finding challenging and what they’re learning.

Consider a summer course

If you want your child to experience medical work in a real hospital setting this summer, learn more about Medicine summer schools.