Gap Medics Launching medical careers

Your hospital placement

First and foremost, we guarantee you a well-organised hospital work experience placement.

We spend a lot of time researching our partner hospitals to ensure you’re placed in a suitable and safe learning environment, with staff who genuinely want to mentor pre-medical and pre-nursing students.

Good supervision is crucial, and in each department you visit you’ll be assigned to a specialist doctor, medical officer, dentist or registered nurse (depending on your placement type) as your personal student mentor. We pay all of our mentors directly to help maintain their motivation and ensure hospital staff see real local benefit from the Gap Medics programme.

Most students over the busy summer period join us for two weeks, choosing to spend their time in some of the major hospital departments such as paediatrics, general medicine, surgery and obstetrics. Outside of the summer months many students choose to spend longer on placement – we’re very flexible however and happy to tailor longer, or more specialized placements at anytime of the year.

You’ll typically spend the day from 8am to 2pm shadowing your mentor on ward rounds, in surgery or in outpatient clinics. On two or three afternoons a week you’ll then join other Gap Medics students for bespoke teaching sessions from doctors and other healthcare professionals on basic clinical skills and medical conditions that are common in the local area in order to help you understand and interpret what you see while shadowing.

“When it came to organising my medical placement I had no idea where to start, having very little travel experience in the past. Not only did the team organise a placement based around our learning objectives, they also provided valuable information on how to apply for visas, which vaccinations we needed and much more” – Francesca, after her nursing placement in Africa.