Why do you need medical work experience?

This is your chance as a prospective medical student to gain an insight in what it is like to actually work as a doctor in the NHS. Not only do you get an insight into what the good points are about being a doctor but also some of the bad points. You get an opportunity to speak to people who actually working in the field of medicine in the NHS. For example, if you have a placement in a GP surgery or a hospital, it will give you a good insight into what it is like working as a doctor in that particular environment, the workload and commitments involved and the different tasks that have to be completed.

You will also be able to see how doctors interact with other members of the multidisciplinary healthcare team. You will also be exposed to some of the more stressful elements of medicine and some of the challenges that doctors face on a day-to-day basis, and not just the romantic side of medicine that you might see on some television shows in which doctors are flying around in helicopters and racing around on the mountain side in their white lab coats treating unconscious or critically ill patients.

This is about the nitty-gritty of every day life working as doctor and not just the interesting elements of medicine. Medicine can indeed be interesting but there are a lot of repetitive and boring tasks that have to be fulfilled to ensure patients are cared for effectively. For example earlier on in your career you may be asked to take a history from multiple patients one after the other, and then take blood tests and fill in investigation request forms. You may be based in a paediatric urgent care centre and see children with temperatures and coughs one after the other, again and again, and again.

Once you have taken a few blood samples, this simple procedure becomes mundane and boring but has to be done by you repeatedly on multiple patients for perhaps years. The actual surgery and medical procedures are being done by somebody much more senior than you with several years more experience. In addition you will be doing these basic tasks perhaps for several years at unsociable hours, overnight and at weekends and bank holidays. There will be considerable disruption to your social and family life due to the requirements of your patients. You can end up in hospital and primary care placement miles away from where you live and the university in which you graduated from. If you do not do particularly well at medical school but do manage to qualify, the system gives you reduced choice where you can undertake your clinical training.

You will see how doctors and nurses interact and look after patients. The workload in terms of the number of patients that a junior doctor will see varies considerably between hospitals and GP surgeries. For example in one hospital you may be responsible for the care of a fixed number of patients on a particular ward, and in another hospital you may be responsible for as many as 80 patients spread over the whole hospital. In one hospital you may have the time to sit together with your team and have lunch and breaks together whereas in another hospital you will hardly have time to have a cup of tea. Being exposed to this will give you a good insight into whether you consider medicine to be a reasonable and appropriate career for yourself.

It is really important when you are considering medicine as a career that you know what you are letting yourself in for. You may have as many as six years of undergraduate training at university, followed by two years of foundation year training before you could even think about deciding what speciality you wish to pursue, so you are already eight years into studying, studying, studying before you could even think about asking yourself the question ‘do I want to be a GP or a surgeon?’. It's that kind of commitment that you need to be really sure about and work experience gives you the pivot in which to undertake this.

You also need to mention your work experience when writing your UCAS personal statement. You will need to relate what you have seen on your placements and add your personal reflections to show the admission tutors that you have at least some of the qualities of a good doctor (and perhaps a good medical student). These include for example the ability to show empathy, maintain your knowledge and skills, professionalism, working as team and ability to cope with pressure. You will also come across qualities of a doctor in the your medical school interview as well as the situational judgement section of the UCAT exam.

Reflection is something that you will undertake as a doctor throughout your medical career and this may be the first time you'll be reflecting on what you have seen during your work experience. Reflection starts with observation and perhaps reading and then asking yourself - what did I learn from this? How can I improve this? How can I relate this to being a doctor? Where did I make a mistake? How can I learn from what went wrong?

Whilst it is more challenging to get face-to-face work experience due to COVID-19, it is possible to reflect on a recording of patient experience, for example patient consultations. Look at what the members of the team are doing, how is the doctor interacting with the patient? How are the members of the medical team interacting with each other? Is there anything in the consultation that is not going well? Is the behaviour of the doctor professional?.

Medicine Work Experience

We offer work experience placements in our own NHS GP surgery at the weekends. Learn in small groups with other students, see real NHS patients, arrange investigations and diagnosis and then come to a diagnosis. You also gain practical skills such as basic life support and surgical skills. All our placements are supervised by fully qualified doctors and undergraduate medical school tutors. Click the link below to learn more and book your place.

Gain experience in clinical skills and practical tasks with full PPE. Learn what it is like being a doctor.

Placements supervised in person by fully qualified NHS doctors and medical school tutors.