Electives In Zambia

Zambia offers a great all-round placement because you can get experience across multiple specialised hospitals. Here are some of the cases you could see patients present with: glaucoma, clubfoot, malnutrition, leptospirosis, septic open wounds, paediatric HIV and cervical cancer — a leading cause of death amongst women in Zambia. There are also burn units, renal units, non-communicable disease units, and you can even observe in theatre if you’re interested. You can get experience with patients suffering from malaria, one of the most common communicable diseases in the country.

In Lusaka, you’ll see unfamiliar tropical diseases like acute malaria, and haematological afflictions like sickle cell. There are also incredible opportunities in the cancer and diseases hospital — the only referral hospital of its kind in Southern Africa. Get additional experience in the busy A&E department, and see an abundance of HIV and related conditions (including mother to child transmission). You may also see things that would, in the UK, be preventable. For example, in Zambia, diarrhoea is the leading cause of death of children under 5.

Our partner hospital in Lusaka is a dedicated women and newborn hospital (the city’s main referral hospital for high risk mothers). On a midwifery placement here, you’ll most likely see multiple births every day thanks to the sheer number of mothers who labour here. You can get involved in pre and postnatal care and see how local staff handle emergency labours like breech births too. You’ll even see the challenges mothers with conditions like HIV face — mother to child transmission of HIV is a serious risk in Zambia. Preeclamptic shock, preterm births and stillbirths become all the more risky when you don’t have the resources you need to deal with them.

In Lusaka, you can get experience with physiotherapy in lots of departments across three separate hospitals — an adult hospital, a paediatric hospital, and a cancer and diseases hospital. Because you have access to so many areas, you’ll see plenty of different conditions; spinal cord injuries, cerebral palsy, and amputation and acute joint rehabilitation among them. In the cancer and diseases hospital you can get some experience with pain management. If you’re interested in orthopaedics and respiratory therapies, we can arrange for you to get experience in these areas too.

On your placement in Zambia, your attention will be on patients in A&E. You’ll see cases of severe malaria, injuries sustained through manual labour, serious burns, and injuries from domestic abuse. Resources are scarce here. Practises may be less familiar too — manual intubation for example. A&E is split across four admissions areas and patient numbers are huge. This is an eye-opening placement, and it’s rewarding thanks to that.

In our partner hopsital’s radiography department, it’s common to see patients referred from smaller clinics in the surrounding community. While you’re in the radiography department, you’ll get experience imaging and helping to diagnose a range of conditions including CVAs, breast screening for cancer, a significant number of orthopedic cases referred from A&E, and spinal MRIs. The hospital has the only government MRI scanner in the country, so this is a busy placement. The hospital also has ultrasound, CT, mammography, and X-ray (still analog in many cases).

On a pharmacy placement in Lusaka, you’ll help check prescriptions and council patients, learn why acquiring some medications is so difficult for the hospital, shadow clinical rounds and come to understand how medication plans are created on a per-patient basis, and learn about compounds and diluting medicines. The hospital also creates its own chemotherapy drugs, so you can learn how cytotoxic drugs are reconstituted, right there in person. You’ll spend most of your time in the main dispensary, but you can get different experience in other dispensaries around the hospital — the paediatric dispensary, the dispensary in the women and newborn hospital, and in surgery.

You’ll get experience in a university teaching hospital on your elective in Zambia. The dental department here is busy, and there are no appointment times — patients just show up. You’ll see plenty of different cases like tooth fractures and cavities, and treatments like fillings, root canals, and abscess treatments. In most cases, saving the tooth is impossible as there are so few available restorative options. Oral surgeries all take place in the same area, and you’ll see that local staff take a more relaxed approach when it comes to infection control.