Medical Work Experience
Medical work experience is vital for anyone considering applying to medicine. It helps you to decide if medicine is right for you. Then, it shows that you are committed to the cause.
Medical work experience is the best way to see what being a doctor is really like. Plus, it will give you plenty to talk about throughout your medical school application.
This page provides the headline information on medical work experience, before offering a step-by-step guide on what you need to do. Don’t forget to use all the subpages to make the most of the section.
What Types Of Medical Work Experience Are There?
Broadly speaking, there are four types of medical work experience. Click the links below to get more insights and advice about each one, including what it entails and how you get it.
How Do I Make The Most of My Medical Work Experience?
Whatever work experience you do, it’s critical you make it count. Many people think doing the placement is enough. But it’s only step one.
In order to stand out, you must reflect on what you’ve seen. This can be tiring, especially after a long day of work experience.
That’s why The Medic Portal has provided a free personal portfolio tool, which allows you to track all of your work experiences, and what you learnt from them, in a clear and simple way.
We recommend a three-step reflection plan for your medical work experience:
- Input experiences straight away
- Reflect and read around experiences
- Revisit and update after a week
What You Need to Do
- Get medical work experience. Speak to your school, contact your local NHS Trust, use your personal contacts, write letters and make phone calls. Ideally, you should get as much experience as possible, spanning hospitals, GPs and care homes.
- Create your personal portfolio. You need to document all your medical work experience as you go. Otherwise you might forget it. Put every experience in the journal-style section of your reflective diary. Use the three-step reflection plan.
- Maximise your work experience. Use it first to check that medicine is right for you. Then make it the backbone of your application, from personal statement to interview.
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