'Towards the end of my first year
at medical school I realised it would be useful to have some way of
earning a bit of extra cash and thus applied to be a Health care
assistant with the Nurse Bank at the Norfolk and Norwich University
Hospital via the NHS Jobs website, I had a
very brief interview and undertook my 4 days training (I was let
off 1 day as I was a medic) and haven't looked back since. I tend
to do about a week of work each holiday (normally earning around
£600) and the occasional Saturday (earning about £110)
during term time. For me it was the perfect job as it is incredibly
flexible and fairly well paid if you are working at the weekend as
well as giving you the opportunity to get used to the
hospital environment and talking to
patients.'
Ian- 4th year medical student
at the University of East Anglia
'When I started my degree I noticed a
fair few local GP surgeries were looking for medical students to
help in summarising notes at the practice, so I approached my local
GP at home and asked if they needed any assistance. Though they had
not directly advertised for this job, turns out they had a backlog
of new patient notes that needed to be summarised onto their
database. For the next 3 years, during each holiday I worked at the
surgery to help them clear their backlog. The work involves going
through each patients notes and print-outs and summarising the data
onto their electronic record which the GP looks at before
consulting. Apart from the good pay, the job meant you were
constantly looking at referral and secondary care letters, so I
actually learnt quite a bit from doing it via ‘passive diffusion’.
Many GP surgeries develop backlogs of patient notes that need to be
summarised and hence there is certainly a market for medical
students in this regard, so keep a look out. My other source of
money came from working for the medical school on open and
interview days. As well as being enjoyable, it also had a sense of
giving something back to the medical school'
Paul - 4th year medical
student at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School
'Google is at the heart of my strategy-
I've tended to have a look at what interests me and then sent off
my CV e.g. I've got an interest in genetics and managed to secure a
fascinating summer of paid work at the Foundation for Genomics and
Population Health in Cambridge. Google also led me to apply to the
Yale Bioethics Summer
Intern program which involved discussions of all
things medical ethics with a passionate group of international
students.'
Catherine - 4th year medical
student at Aberdeen