Electives in Sri Lanka

Work the World's partner hospital in Kandy is huge, and you can get experience in a range of departments. The hospital has many specialist ICUs you can get experience in, including: surgical, medical, cardiothoracic, the coronary care unit, psychiatry, OBG, and general medicine. When it comes to patients, you’ll see people present conditions that are either rare or non-existent in the UK. These could include tropical infectious diseases like dengue fever, chikungunya, and chagas, or things like tuberculosis and malnutrition.

In Kandy, you can get experience in departments including psychiatry, surgery, OBG, and general medicine, among others. For cultural and religious reasons, the practices and attitudes towards medicine in Sri Lanka may differ from what you’ve learned. You can also get experience in the plastic surgery department, where services focus on reconstructive surgery, including skin and flap grafting, tendon and nerve repair, burn management, and non-cosmetic implant procedures. You can also gain experience in the Anaesthetic Department. Our partner hospital is also known for its extraordinarily broad range of ICUs, including surgical ICU, medical ICU, cardiothoracic ICU, coronary care unit, and cardiac ICU. Treatments are free at the point of care for patients in Sri Lanka, but a lack of resources is still a real challenge for local staff. Our medical electives in Sri Lanka offer you the experience of a lifetime.

Our partner hospital in Kandy is a tertiary referral hospital so it sees a lot of complicated pregnancies. To give you some idea of the numbers, c-sections make up around 40% of all births in the country. You can actually see what this looks like as a midwifery student in Sri Lanka by spending time in one of the theatres dedicated to OBG cases. You might also want to rotate through wards like antenatal, labour, and postnatal wards, and the premature baby unit. You have access to the hospital’s lactation management centre too.

The radiology department in Work the World's partner hospital in Kandy is one of the few in Sri Lanka that offer all types of radiographic diagnostic services under one roof. This means the department is often busy despite being open 24/7. To give you some idea, on any given day, local staff can perform up to 400 X-rays, 150 CT scans, and 10 MRIs. Undertake your placement here, and you can choose to rotate through any (or all) of the following: X-ray rooms, the dental X-ray department, the CT room, the MRI unit, the DSA unit, and the mammography unit. If your focus is radiotherapy, you can get experience alongside local radiotherapists to learn about the challenges of administering treatments in a low-resource setting.

The dentistry department at our partner hospital is separated into four units — the OPD, restorative dentistry, orthodontics and maxillofacial. The department offers a range of treatments like root canal treatment, wisdom tooth removal, restorations, pulpectomies, and infection management. You’ll see equipment like cavitrons, drilling machines, and sterilisers, and curing lights have recently been introduced. The maxillofacial unit provides routine oral surgeries, major oral surgeries like cleft lip and palate surgeries, and some emergency surgeries. If you spend any time in maxillofacial, you will probably see cases of oral cancer too.

On an OT elective in Kandy, you'll spend time addressing injuries and neurological conditions with the local occupational therapy team. Other common conditions you might see include burns, fractures, limb deformities, cerebral palsy, Down’s syndrome, cerebral visual impairments, and skeletal injuries. You'll see how local staff work with limited resources to restore mobility, prevent scarring, strengthen muscles, improve coordination, and enhance sensory and motor function and well-being. With up to 30 patients daily, you'll learn how the team manages referrals, assessments, follow-ups, and treatment plans, working to develop individualised rehabilitation strategies.

You'll see many cases and treatments in the Emergency Treatment Unit at your placement hospital in Kandy. Some will be familiar — road traffic accidents, myocardial infarction, strokes. But others will be far from what you know, like snake bites. The department is resource-limited but busy, with up to 100 patients admitted in a 24-hour period. You could also get access to and experience with some cross-over facilities like MRI and X-ray.

A pharmacy internship in Kandy will highlight local practitioners' daily limitations. Spending time in Work the World's major partner hospital, you’ll come to understand how local specialists manage and distribute the limited supplies they have. There is a noticeable lack of funding here, and administrative processes are often manual. When it comes to patients, you’ll encounter people from Kandy itself and those from rural communities who’ve travelled great distances to receive treatment.

Undertaking your placement in the rheumatology department’s physiotherapy unit, Kandy offers a varied placement. You’ll experience in several areas including the neurosurgical ward, surgical ICU and cardiothoracics. You can also spend time in the OPD, helping to rehabilitate patients using basic gym equipment and other treatments. The OPD sees a steady stream of patients daily. Common conditions include cerebral palsy, stroke, fractures, burns, MSK, Guillain-Barre syndrome, and beyond. If you’re interested in sports medicine, you can spend time in the dedicated unit that offers various services, including sports medicine clinics for school children and physiotherapy programs for athletes.

Your placement will be in a hospital established in the 1800s, now the second-largest in Sri Lanka. Here, you can gain experience in departments like pathology, virology, microbiology, and haematology. In the recently established molecular biology unit, you'll observe how local specialists use cancer-related DNA testing to identify specific cancer markers. In Kandy, tropical communicable diseases are widespread, allowing you to assist in diagnosing illnesses such as dengue fever, leptospirosis, and cholera.