School Student
What's surgery like?
Work Experience
Work experience is incredibly useful for finding out if you are suited to medicine and where your specialty interests may lie.
It can be hard to find clinical work experience but it will be a useful addition to your application. Ideally, you should try and get work experience in an area of medicine in which you are interested but if you can’t you can try other departments in hospitals, clinics or GP surgeries. You will need to be flexible about when and where you do work experience. It is worth talking to your school and seeing if they mind you taking time off.
You will need to be at least 16, possibly older, to find a work placement in a hospital. If you find it difficult to find a placement shadowing a GP or hospital doctor try to gain some work experience in a healthcare setting such as a local nursing home, doing paid or voluntary work.
To find work experience, contact your local hospitals to discover whether they accept work experience students. Try contacting a work placement coordinator, or the medical staffing department (also known as human resources). You can also try to get work experience through your GP surgery or at a rehabilitation clinic or similar (sometimes this might be easier than approaching a hospital). If you are lucky enough to find work experience in a hospital setting you may find our handout 'Information for Work Experience Students' useful, it contains information on how to behave when on clinical work experience or when visiting an operating theatre as well as information on terms and acronyms you may hear in and around the theatre.
If you can’t find a formal work experience placement, try volunteering at a hospital after school or at the weekend for non clinical activities. Also consider volunteering at care homes or day care centres. You might also want to consider working for the St John's Ambulance or other, similar organisations.
