Can You Specialise on Your Medical Elective?

Travelling with us gives you extraordinary flexibility to create the medical elective experience you want.

Some people use this flexibility to gain experience in different departments—this helps if you’re not sure where you want to specialise.

But what if you’ve already got a good idea about where you want to specialise?

During your placement with Work the World, you can spend your entire clinical experience in one department or speciality. This is one of the big benefits of our long-standing partnerships with hospitals and clinics worldwide.

Max Elwig, a fourth-year medical student, recently travelled with us to the Philippines. Initially, he organised his placement independently, but his plans fell through at the last minute. He wanted to spend most of his time in ENT — the speciality he hopes to enter. Thanks to our unique hospital partnerships, he could do this, getting much more from the clinical experience than he otherwise would have.

“We contacted Work the World, and they quickly put together a placement in The Philippines for us with only two weeks’ notice. In hindsight, I’m so glad it worked out the way it did because I think we had a much better time than we would have.

The fact that Work the World organises the finer details of hospital placement and has relationships with local hospitals is reason enough.” – Max Elwig, fourth-year medical student

Choose from an enormous range of departments and specialities.

Having the flexibility to choose doesn’t mean much without a varied selection of options for you to choose from. This isn’t a problem you’ll encounter while planning your placement with Work the World.

You can choose from an enormous range of healthcare settings, including different types of hospitals, departments, specialities and sub-specialities.

To give you some idea of the range of more specific options available, we’ve had students and recent graduates get experience in:

• Plastic and reconstructive surgery
• Gastroenterology
• Neurosurgery
• Paeds & paediatric surgery
• Urology
• ENT
• Anaesthetics
• Orthopaedics
• OBG
• Internal medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Cardiology and cardiothoracic
• Dermatology
• + More

You can even drill down into sub-specialities. If you’re interested in a more specific kind of surgery, for example, you can choose from neurosurgery, renal transplant, paediatric surgery, gastrointestinal surgery, plastic surgery and more.

 And you can spend your entire placement in one specialist area if that’s what you choose.

You get an extraordinary level of flexibility on a placement with us

Even though you might initially want to focus on a specific area of medicine, you’ll still get the same level of flexibility that has earned us our reputation as the UK’s leading provider of medical electives.

When you’re out in whichever destination you’ve chosen, one of the first things you’ll notice is that Work the World staff have a presence in your placement hospital. They spend a lot of time developing relationships with hospital staff, including hospital directors.

These in-person relationships mean that if you decide while on placement that you would like to get experience in another department, chances are you’ll be able to. This does depend on the duration of your elective and available space in the departments you’re looking at.

Of course, your placement will be planned and organised before you travel. But if things need to be adjusted while you're overseas, your in-country team is there to help.

Get started

Once you’ve registered for your medical placement abroad, you’ll have a call with one of our consultants to discuss your background and clinical interests. You’ll then get much more specific information about the options available to you in the destination you’re travelling to.

If you want a better idea about the options available based on your current interests, enquire via the short form at the bottom of this page, and we’ll get back to you with more information as soon as possible.