What kind of opportunities do medical internships abroad offer that you can’t have in your own country?

Trying to find work placement within your own country can be really difficult. I know that especially in the UK, unless you know someone or have a relative within the medical profession already, it can be quite a challenge to gain some serious placement positions. Volunteering within the NHS only offers a restricting amount of access to patients and doctors, but is still recommended. Whilst overseas work experience offers you a comparison between the health services of the different countries. GapMedics provides placements that allow you to work in small groups to see the skills that doctors in a foreign country have had to develop in order to provide medical help for people, which is hugely different compared to the UK especially. The opportunities also provide you with a insight into whether or not you would actually want to work abroad with medicine, in addition to a 'culture shock' in hospitals, as you see the 'raw medicine' especially in places such as in Africa, which is not possible to see in the UK. This opportunity really allows you to see if medicine is the right thing for you, and if you can handle the conditions that the country offers in terms of medical care. Finally you can see procedures that you cannot see in the UK, such as live births, I was lucky enough to see 3, and it gives you a sense of what real medicine is actually like. All of this you can talk about in your interview, it was brought up in mine, and I used many examples of what I saw from my trip to compare it to my UK work experience to show some real commitment and passion for the subject. Hope all of that helps.

They offer a much more hands-on experience that you can become a lot more involved with. At home, we are so restricted during work experience placements by strict health and safety and patient confidentiality laws that it's almost impossible to get stuck in. However, overseas they are more relaxed with these rules so students are allowed to learn more about how things work in a healthcare setting, rather than observing from afar.

For example, taking blood pressures and weighing babies as well as being the first to hold new borns.