Radiography Elective Placements Abroad

Your radiography elective placement in Ghana will take place at our busy partner hospital. You’ll help the team provide diagnostic services for departments across the hospital and smaller clinics in the surrounding area. This means you can get experience observing and analysing a diverse range of conditions. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that radiography departments in Ghana aren’t as well-equipped as they are in the UK. So, understanding how local staff get around this is a big part of why placements here are so interesting. You even have the chance to get experience that would be impossible back in the UK, like using a darkroom to develop X-rays on film. Read stories from those who’ve already travelled with Work the World to Takoradi for their radiography elective in Ghana.

You can expect a varied and interesting placement in our partner hospital in Kandy. The hospital is relatively well equipped, so you’ll have the chance to get to grips with a range of technologies — CT scans and angiograms, MRI scanning, mammography, digital subtraction angiography and radio-opaque substance investigations like barium swallows and enemas. You could even access operating theatres and a catheterisation lab. If your interest lies in radiotherapy, you can get a breadth of experience in Kandy. You’ll see a range of therapies and treatments, and the manner in which they are administered will also differ in many cases.

On a radiography elective in Dar es Salaam, you’ll gain experience in Tanzania’s best-equipped radiography department. Patients here are normally referred from the hospital’s general wards, casualty, the specialist orthopaedic institute, and from other smaller hospitals in Dar es Salaam. If you’re interested in radiotherapy, you can spend time in a specialised cancer hospital too. Tanzanian hospitals rarely offer radiotherapy as training and equipment are expensive. Some patients have to travel hundreds of miles, literally, to seek care. Because demand is so high, some patients have to wait as long as two years to be seen. Read stories from those who’ve already travelled with Work the World to Dar es Salaam.

Your placement in Hue is in a university teaching hospital. While you’re here, you’ll get experience with both scanning and helping to interpret imagery. That said, much of the diagnostic radiography equipment in the hospital is out of date, and some machines (that hospitals in the UK might take for granted) don’t exist at all. The general lack of resources in the Vietnamese healthcare system also means the department is understaffed. You’ll learn exactly how local staff cope with this lack of staff and machinery, and this will give you an adaptability that will serve you throughout your career as a radiographer.

Your radiology elective placement in Iloilo happens in our partner hospital’s X-ray department. The department is split into two areas — one focused on fluoroscopic procedures, the other on computer and digital radiography. The Philippines is a developing country, and its infrastructure is sometimes shaky, so hospitals experience regular power cuts. When this happens, there’s a backup darkroom used to develop X-rays on film. Supplies are low in this hospital, and you’ll see staff developing ingenious ways to get around this. For example, local radiographers inject grape juice into patients with low contrast dye stocks. Read stories from those who’ve already travelled with Work the World to Iloilo.