Choosing your elective – UK or otherwise…

Although my elective was a few months ago now, I thought I would write a post about it, as I did an elective in the UK.

A medical elective is a period of time spent in a different medical environment to our usual hospital exposure. At Warwick it is 6 weeks long, and comes at the end of the third year. The traditional medical elective was usually to somewhere with a less developed healthcare system than the UK, to help out and to gain an appreciation of the NHS. However, nowadays people go all over the world, from the Caribbean to America to Nepal and to Africa. Having said that, a growing minority choose to do an elective in the UK. This can be for financial or family reasons, or just because you’re interested in something that the UK is the best place to experience.

I think I’d like to be a gastroenterologist, so I arranged an elective at the QE hospital in Birmingham, which is the regional centre for liver transplantation. I spent 6 weeks with the team there, helping the juniors out where I could and also meeting patients with advanced and complicated liver disease which you just don’t see outside specialist centres.

My elective really helped to build my confidence, and it was great to see how a hospital in a different trust worked. My clinical partner did his elective here in Coventry in pre-hospital and emergency medicine, and he got to go out with ambulance teams, the major incident response team and a whole load of other pre-hospital teams, as well as seeing patients in A&E. I like my patients in a warm, dry and relatively predictable environment so that is one of my worst nightmares but if you’re into that sort of thing then it’s a pretty amazing thing to do!

My boyfriend’s elective was also at home, in Intensive Care. He did a research elective so he planned and implemented his own research project and managed to convert his time there into a couple of presentations (one in Barcelona, which I went along to for “support” – it’s a hard life) and some publications, which look great for his CV.

Doing electives at home also meant that we had enough money to go to Thailand for 3 weeks over summer – where we didn’t have to set foot in a hospital or do any work at all. I feel like I managed to get the best of both worlds there!

I would really recommend thinking about your elective during the first few years at medical school. If you really want to go abroad, then start saving and go for it. But with the increase in tuition fees and competition for specialist training as stiff as ever, a UK elective can be both a financially and professionally savvy move.

Megan Earle : 26 Jan 2015 10:11 |  Tags: Electives Mbchb Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem