Work the World sponsored the elective photo competition at Woolongong University at the end of 2011. Check out some of the amazing photos that were sent in…
Intrathecal injection of methrotrexate, Nepal
Fiesta de La Virgen Natividato, Cusco
Woolongong Winners!
Friday, February 17th, 2012
Student medic reflects on how an overseas elective can impact upon your future career
Sunday, September 4th, 2011
When planning your elective it is easy to get swept up in the excitement of foreign travel; the anticipation of new experiences, new friends, new tastes, smells and sights. Amongst all this it can be easy to forget the real reason that you are going on your elective in the first place.
It can also be difficult to visualise the impact that your elective will have on the rest of your career, particularly if, like me, your elective comes relatively early on in your medical school career. It wasn’t until a year or so after I got back, when I sat down to think about the MTAS form and FY1 postings, that I really thought through what my experiences in Tanzania had taught me, how this might affect my future practice and how this might benefit my career.
Delivering a baby
Win money towards your Elective with the The Encephalitis Society
Friday, June 24th, 2011
Encephalitis Society Medical Student Essay Prize
The Encephalitis Society would like to invite UK medical school student’s undergraduate and postgraduate level interested in Encephalitis to participate in the Medical Student Essay Prize.
A prize of £500 will be awarded for the best medical student essay on a topic relevant to Encephalitis. You could use this money towards paying for your summer work placement or elective.
The winner will also be invited to give a presentation at one of the Society’s meetings.
Criteria: The applicant should be a medical student in a recognised UK Medical School on 1st October 2011. The essay must be on any aspect of Encephalitis. The essay should be around 3000 words excluding references. Entries will be judged on style, impact of subject and originality. The applicants should also provide a current Curriculum Vita.
Deadline: Submissions are due in electronic Word format by 1st October 2011 for the attention of Ava Easton ava@encephalitis.info . Hard copy will not be accepted.
Tanzania: A Medical Elective by Ben Casey
Thursday, June 16th, 2011
For my elective I decided to travel to Tanzania. It is a country I’ve visited before as a tourist and I loved it so much I wanted to go back and see it from another perspective. I arranged a placement with Work the World as they promised to take all of the hassle out of arranging it. It paid off.
Mount Meru Regional Hospital
My elective was based at Mount Meru Regional Hospital in Arusha. The hospital has some 450 in-patient beds (although this might better represent the number of patients rather than actual beds as described later) and sees 600 out-patients daily. It serves a large population and provides a wide variety of services: A&E, obstetrics and gynaecology, TB and leprosy wards, general surgery including orthopaedics, psychiatry, and physiotherapy among some other departments. It was and is a very busy hospital and is staffed by very few doctors who are assisted by over 180 nurses.
The top 10…. diseases in Argentina
Monday, June 6th, 2011
We are always asked about the kind of diseases students will witness, or assist in treating whilst they are overseas. This time we’ve chosen to focus on Mendoza and look at the top 10 common and rare diseases.
Nat, our Mendoza Programme Manager spoke to some of the students about what they have seen so far. Kirren, from Birmingham, actually said “my supervisor came and told me to write the name of a syndrome down, because I’m never going to see that again anywhere!”. Beth from Bristol found that the diseases she saw in Mendoza were completely different to what she had ever expected, taking a notebook in her pocket to keep track of the diseases she sees every day. That helps her own statistics as well as giving her practise in more Spanish!
The Weekly Question – what has been your clinical highlight this week?
Wednesday, May 4th, 2011
Newborn in Arusha
Whether it be the treatment of patients, rare and tropical diseases or progressed pathologies, an overseas placement is both fascinating and a great learning environment where students are often exposed to things that they have only read about in the past. Although we have asked this question a couple of times we always get different answers.
James in Arusha examined a patient with a hepatonegaly larger than any that he had seen in Hong Kong. “Another close second would be a multiple casualty car accident that caused 9 deaths.”
Ghana – the gateway to Africa
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
Wow, where do I start? Unlike when I was writing an essay at university, I think I could easily write 10,000 words about my trip to Ghana in record time. As not to bore you all I will summarise my trip below but please do not hesitate to get in touch should you have more any questions.
I took the evening KLM flight to Accra via Amsterdam. As with all great trips I thought I was never going to make it when my first flight was delayed leaving London and I had to run through Amsterdam airport at record spe
Team Ghana
ed to make my on-going flight. I made it though and was then on a nonstop flight to Ghana. This was my first trip to Africa and I was extremely excited, I think everyone is warned that your arrival may be a little intimidating with all the hustle and bustle and the locals keen to get you into their taxi or to book into their hotel but I was pleasantly surprised. I walked through the airport arrivals with ease and Joe, the Programme Manger was the first person to try and get my attention.
Preparar el paciente para la operación……….ummmm……que???
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
Now at first glance you may think “it’s another language, I don’t get it”, but have another look……. it’s not that hard to pick out words, and with just a little bit of initiative most of us would understand that “Preparar el paciente para la operación” simply means “prepare the patient for the operation”. And you thought you couldn’t speak the language!
Learning how to make Empanadas
Now try another…… “Tiene cancer, que come Usted sabe, es una enfermedad dificil pero se puede tratar”. A bit more tricky, but there are a couple of words that could be guessed……..
Medical Student Guest Blog – week five
Thursday, March 17th, 2011
I am a third year medical student from a British university, writing about the experiences I have on my first clinical year. I have no particular blog-writing credentials and I certainly don’t consider my life as being of any interest to anyone else. However, my medical school are always banging on about the importance of “reflective writing” and so this seems like a golden opportunity to say what I really think…
I’ve just come to the end of my second week at my second hospital placement. On the first day we received a short induction, which went almost entirely in-one-ear-and-out-of-the-other, as I spent the session looking around at my peers and wondering who the hell everyone was. OK, so I recognised a few individuals, but given the fact that I have been sitting in a room with these people for a fair proportion of the last two years, I could have filled a double decker bus with people it felt like I was passing my eyes over for the very first time! I began to worry that I had developed that rare neurological condition known as Capgras Syndrome – where you are unable to recognise familiar faces, places or objects…Or had suffered a cerebrovascular incident during the night…Or, worse still, I had wondered into the wrong lecture theatre and was currently surrounded by the new intake of occupational therapists…
I was brought back from this weird direction of thought by something the administrative gentleman giving the talk said. He warned us that we were all bound to suffer from a rose-tinted, nostalgic longing for our first placement during the next couple of weeks, but that we should ride it out until we became familiar with our new surroundings. Well I was completely outraged by this. It was all I could do not to walk out to the front of the lecture hall, pull him up by his slightly oversized ears and scream at him about how cruelly I had been treated by the people at my last placement. About how I would rather spend eternity locked up in a prison cell with only a very hyperactive, constantly shrieking, omnipresent Graham Norton for company, than be made to go back to that dark, foreboding wasteland of a hospital. But then I realised this would have been kind of missing the point.
From Nepal to Brighton – where the elective begins
Monday, January 24th, 2011
The famous red phone box!
I breathed a sense of relief when the cabin crew announced we were about to land into Gatwick airport. After being boxed in for more than 7 hours and feeling claustrophobic, I couldn’t have been happier to hear the announcement. I took the first available flight from Kathmandu to Doha and onwards to Gatwick to make it to the annual WTW conference which I had already missed by a day. Better late than never, as they say, this trip was an experience and one to cherish.
Some hints of drizzle welcomed my arrival in London. I could sense the England winter. The cold weather though, wore off after getting a warm welcome by Alison. Straight from Gatwick airport it was to 95, Ditchling Road, Brighton…our head office where the conference was being held. Arriving Brighton was like stepping into history. Medieval yet modern and hip Brighton was calm, laid back and colourful. Finally, into the office, there were oodles of hi s and hellos and handshakes followed – meeting everyone from WTW head office and program managers from Argentina and Ghana. A few minutes after feeling a bit foreign in the room, i got myself acclimatized. The conference began with several meetings, brainstorming, exchanging ideas and views and presentation on different programs. Besides presenting Nepal to all the other staff it was good to know about other programs and how each program was so unique. The best part of the day for me however, was in the evening to be able to retire back to bed. I was sort of jet-lagged and tired; I had to hit the sack!