Medical Elective Placements Overseas

In Kandy, you can undertake your medical placement in a government teaching hospital or a more specialist paediatric institute. The vast teaching hospital houses eleven special units, seven ICUs and 23 theatres. The hospital serves an area with a population of around 2.5 million potential patients, so you can expect consistently high patient numbers.  You can also gain unique experience in a plastic surgery department, where you observe procedures such as skin grafts, flap grafts, tendon and nerve repairs, burn management, and non-cosmetic implant surgeries. The specialised paediatric hospital has an exceptional national reputation. The hospital admits paediatric cases from newborns to 16-year-olds, so that you can see everything from premature babies to complex paediatric surgeries.

Discover student stories from those who’ve already travelled with us to Sri Lanka.

On a medical elective in Ghana, you can undertake your placement in a district-level hospital, a dedicated maternity clinic, or the best-equipped hospital in the city. Regarding the latter, don’t be under the impression that ‘best-equipped’ means ‘well-equipped’ — medicine in Ghana is completely different to what you’ll be used to. Resources are minimal here, making the placement perhaps more eye-opening than some of our other elective programmes. That said, you’ll see how local staff work creatively to overcome these significant barriers to providing adequate care. Medical electives in Africa don't get any better than this.

Discover student stories from those who’ve already travelled with Work the World to Takoradi.

All aspects of our electives for medical students in Iloilo are guaranteed to be unique. You will undertake your placement in Panay Island’s largest government tertiary referral hospital and a tertiary teaching hospital. The Philippines does have a national health insurance service, but its coverage is limited (even in government hospitals). To offer some perspective, local doctors must deliver treatments and prescribe medicine based on patients’ financial solvency rather than their needs. Combine this with the fact that patients are predominantly from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and this profoundly impacts the provision of care. If you're interested in medical electives in Asia, you should add Iloilo to your shortlist.

Discover student stories from those who’ve already travelled with Work the World to Iloilo.

On your medical elective in Tanzania, you can undertake your placement in a hospital well-known for maternity, an orthopaedics and traumatology institute, a well-reputed regional hospital, or the largest national referral hospital in Tanzania. Dar es Salaam is the largest city in the country, and with that comes a breadth of unique health issues. For example, economically disadvantaged areas are prone to infectious disease outbreaks, but like none you’ve seen before — cholera, cerebral malaria, and tuberculosis are significant issues. Work the World offers several medical placements in Africa, and Dar es Salaam should be on your list.

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You will undertake your medical placement in a 600-bed university teaching hospital in Hue. Around half of the hospital’s patients are from Vietnam’s rural, economically disadvantaged areas. For many such patients, healthcare is free. However, going to the hospital means a costly journey and sacrificing days of paid work while admitted. As a result, patients often delay the inevitable. This means extremely late presentations and severely advanced conditions, which you may not encounter at a medical school in the UK. Needless to say, the medicine you’ll see practised here will be considerably different from what you’re used to.

Discover student stories from those who’ve already travelled with us to Hue.