Electives In Indonesia

On placement, you'll see patients presenting conditions so severe that you’ll wonder how they managed the pain (especially when there's so little pain medication in Indonesia). Why does this happen? Healthcare is expensive here, so patients wait until their conditions worsen before seeking treatment.  On your nursing placement in Yogyakarta, you'll see that hospitals here have a real lack of resources—you’ll see the lengths to which local nurses have to go to get the job done. And based on your nursing branch, you can spend time in as many different departments as you choose. You’ll see cases you're used to in the UK, plus a few (like dengue fever), that aren't familiar to you.

In Yogyakarta, you can rotate through lots of different departments — OBG, internal medicine, A&E… whichever take your interest. Most hospitals in the city (and, for that matter, in Indonesia more generally) lack resources. So you’ll learn firsthand what it takes to get the job done as a medic in this environment. When it comes to conditions, you’ll see many common cases, plus a few you won’t have seen like dengue fever. Some patients present conditions so far advanced you’ll wonder how they coped with the pain (especially with Indonesia’s analgesia scarcity). Why does this happen? Healthcare is relatively expensive here, so many patients here wait until the last minute to seek treatment.

It starts from the moment you walk through the doors of our partner hospital in Yogyakarta. You’ll see low-resource wards, a lack of up-to-date equipment, and low staffing levels compared to what you’re used to in the UK. You’ll recognise wards and departments like OBG and NICU, but the way local midwives approach their discipline here is very different indeed. Staff face unique challenges here too. For instance, in 2016, around 3200 children were infected with HIV due to mother-to-child transmission. But the real insight comes from seeing just how differently local staff approach complications like breech births and eclampsia.

There are more differences between physiotherapy in the UK and Indonesia than you probably realise. Once you get going in our physiotherapy department here in Yogyakarta, you’ll start unpacking these differences for yourself. One big challenge for local staff is a lack of equipment, and a few weeks on placement here will make you appreciate what’s available on the NHS. You’ll engage with patients from some of the island of Java’s most economically disadvantaged areas, and the cases themselves are eye-opening. You’ll see paediatric patients, cerebral palsy and other neurological conditions, spinal injuries, severe burns, post-surgical patients… we could go on.

Do your radiography elective in Yogyakarta and you’ll get a closeup look at what it’s like to practise radiography in a developing healthcare system. Local staff will deliver to you a masterclass in resourcefulness, and demonstrate the definition of ‘making do with what you’ve got’. To be clear, you will recognise some of the equipment. But what’s there is likely to be outdated (compared to UK standards). Some technologies that we take for granted - even in the NHS - don’t exist at all.

In Yogyakarta, you’ll learn all the ins and outs of an Indonesian hospital pharmacy. But the real point of a placement like this is to see how local pharmacists make do when medicine is in such short supply. You won’t just be standing by — you’ll learn how staff dispense medicines, visit wards to learn about patient medication plans, help keep track of stock, learn how patients have to cope without pain relief, and see how traditional medicine helps fill the gaps. This is just a snapshot of what you’ll get involved in on this eye-opening placement.

You’ll start getting insights into the Indonesian approach to dentistry as soon as you step into the department. Equipment might seem outdated, but local dentists are absolutely expert at doing the best they can with what you have. You stand to learn a lot from them in the way of resourcefulness. Something else you’ll notice from day one is that preventative techniques are less of a priority here than in the UK. There are lots of reasons for this. One prominent reason is that in many cases decay is severely advanced. And the reason for this is that patients can’t afford preventative treatment. Many will only seek help when pain becomes too much to bear and it’s too late to save the tooth.