11/09/2010

Midwifery Work, Medical & Nursing Experience: Gap Year

Before you embark on any career direction it is usually a good idea to get some work-experience in that area, and midwifery is no exception to that rule! Training to become a midwife involves completion of a degree programme which will take you a minimum of 3 years – some can take even longer – and you don’t want to get to the end of this only to find that midwifery is not everything you had ever dreamed it was! It is not all working with bonny bouncing babies and their happy cooing parents, and a suitable work experience placement should lay out for you all the positive and negative aspects of the role – the “warts and all” version – to enable you to decide whether or not midwifery is the career for you, before you commit yourself.

Another benefit of a midwifery work-experience placement is that it enables you to stand out from a crowd of other university applicants all looking to secure themselves a future in what has become quite a competitive industry in recent years. And it is by no means easy to obtain midwifery experience in a domestic setting; since setting up we have had a stream of enquiries from people looking to do exactly that but having come up against a brick wall. The problem is that – as with any healthcare area – staff are often stretched pretty much to capacity, and find it incredibly hard to take on an untrained person, who is essentially only there to learn from them, rather than support them.

Of course, within the midwifery community – as with the medical profession – there has always been a strong ethos surrounding the provision of training and work-experience opportunities for aspiring healthcare professionals. As a result you are bound to find people who, despite their busy schedules, are willing to offer you some sort of placement. However, this is often the point at which you hit this brick wall, as the various issues surrounding insurance, confidentiality, health & safety legislation, and a hundred-and-one other things start cropping up, eventually leading them to conclude that it really isn’t worth the bother after all!

If you really want to have some experience of what Midwifery is like, and don’t want to wait until you are a university student before you get the chance, then Gap Medics may be exactly the organisation that you have been looking for. We can cut straight through the problems, issues and layers of bureaucracy that you would have to face and provide you with an incredible Midwifery work-experience placement at the end of it, in a fascinating, exotic destination.

Gap Medics Tanzania programme in particular is perfect for aspiring midwives. They work with a number of hospitals out there, with skilled professionals working on busy maternity wards, without access to the sort of resources that their midwifery equivalents would have in your own country.

This really is midwifery laid bare. You will experience everything that a Tanzanian midwife goes through, as you shadow your supervisor throughout their working week. In the evenings you return to our local Gap Medics house where you will be able to share your experiences with aspiring students of other healthcare professions, from around the world. And on the weekends you will be able to travel to some of the most incredible tourist destinations that Africa has to offer, such as Serengeti National Park, Mount Kilimanjaro and the Zanzibar archipelago!

Midwifery in Africa

Gap Medics offers pre-university medical and nursing work experience placements to help you on your way to a career in healthcare.

Imagine a delivery room where the only pain relief is paracetamol and unless you bring your own sterile water it won’t be administered, a place where
expectant mothers must bring their own sheets and make their own bed whilst battling contractions. Think about what it must be like to go into labour and not be allowed to shout out. Now picture yourself in the middle of it – a Gap Medics student in Africa.

Taking a placement in a developing country provides a huge learning curve for students. It allows you to learn and practice skills in a different
environment, challenges your perceptions and opens your eyes to healthcare around the world. For our sister company Work the World, students who have had a minimum of one years training can undertake specialist midwifery placements. Lois, a Work the World student in Ghana commented that: “being a student trained in the UK, where we have the privilege of drugs and medical equipment, it’s very difficult to accept that sometimes there really is nothing more you can do. You have to separate yourself from how you would manage an emergency in the UK and how you can physically and realistically manage it in a developing country”.

It may sound shocking to us, but Africa is home to some of the poorest countries in the world. Infant mortality and maternity complication rates are high because there simply isn’t the money to support a better system. Lois soon found that despite the challenging conditions, midwifery knowledge and skills can be used anywhere. Within 45 minutes of her induction she was helping deliver her first baby of the day, and many more followed. Though some were straightforward, many had complications such as postpartum haemorrhage, often due to anaemia and grand multiparity. In the UK potential complications like anaemia are identified during pregnancy, and precautions taken during labour. Developing countries cannot provide that same level of care leading up to the birth, so the opportunity to witness cases as they happen offers elective students an opportunity to identify and treat, rather than just read about situations and symptoms in text books.

Freddy, one of the Gap Medics Tanzania Programme Managers, often talks to students about the huge differences between UK and African care: “women all give birth in one room, no local anaesthetic is provided for suturing or episiotomy and newborn babies are immediately taken away from their mothers and placed in incubators”. Freddy, like Lois, is keen to point out how important it is that students understand that this is just the way things work in Africa and he encourages students work in all levels of maternity work, paediatrics, vaccination programmes, malaria treatment and family planning, placement students will get a better idea of healthcare in his country, as well as learn new skills. A placement in Africa is a fantastic opportunity to learn, utilise skills and provide, as Lois found, a chance to “see things you may not see again in Midwifery…an extremely humbling experience.”

Gap Medics Ltd

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Healthcare Placements in Africa, Asia & The Caribbean