Work Experience and Volunteering

For Young Learners

What This Is

Work experience for medicine means any setting where you have had responsibility for other people, or have watched healthcare being delivered.

Most applicants assume it has to be a hospital. Most medical schools say clearly that it does not. What they ask for is evidence that you have some idea what caring for people is like, and that you have thought about it.

Medicine has a high rate of people leaving training. Admissions teams are trying to reduce that, and one of the few predictors they have is whether an applicant has seen the reality of the work rather than a version of it on television.

That is the question behind the requirement. It is not a test of whose parents could arrange a placement.

How It Works

Experience tends to fall into three kinds, and a strong application usually has more than one.

Care experience. A care home, a hospice, a special school, a day centre, a befriending scheme. Often the most useful of the three, and usually the easiest to arrange.

Observation. Shadowing in a hospital, a GP surgery, a pharmacy or a physiotherapy clinic. Harder to get, and often less revealing than people expect.

Responsibility. A paid job, a sports team, a youth group, a cadet force, caring for a family member. This counts, and applicants routinely leave it out because it does not look medical.

Virtual and online placements have grown since schools found hospital access restricted, and a number of medical schools now say explicitly that they accept them.

How to Prepare

Start with what is already around you. A local care home, a charity shop, a sports club or a scout group is a realistic approach for a fifteen year old and a hospital placement often is not.

Keep a short note after each session. Two or three sentences on what happened and what it made you think. Doing this at the time is far easier than reconstructing a year of it the week a personal statement is due.

Ask about minimum ages early. Many clinical settings have one, and knowing it saves you writing to places that cannot take you yet.

Common Mistakes

Listing placements instead of reflecting on them. A list of four hospitals scores worse than one care home described in a way that shows you noticed something.

Writing that it confirmed your passion for medicine. Admissions tutors read that sentence thousands of times a cycle and it tells them nothing.

Treating a paid Saturday job as irrelevant. Dealing with difficult customers for a year is relevant experience and should be written about as such.

Chasing quantity. Depth over one or two settings is worth more than a week in six.

Where to Find Out More

The Medical Schools Council publishes guidance on what work experience each school expects, including those that ask for none.

The NHS publishes advice on finding work experience and lists virtual options.

A school careers adviser usually has contacts with local care providers and university outreach teams, which is a faster route than writing to hospitals yourself.