News: Volunteering today, good for doctors tomorrow
28 September 2009
A letter highlighting how volunteering can help medical students to become safe and effective doctors.
We would like to highlight one of the ways in which volunteering can help medical students to gain the skills they need to become safe and effective doctors.
For six years, Student Action for Refugees (STAR) at St George's, University of London, has offered medical students (alongside other healthcare students including nursing, physiotherapy and radiography students) the opportunity to work on and to lead projects that deliver services for displaced young people living in south London.
In partnership with its sister charity, the Klevis Kola Foundation (www.kleviskola.org), STAR delivers after school clubs, a football club, a mentoring service, trips and holidays, and an advocacy service. Each project is delivered in partnership by a representative from the charity and one from the student group. Students are encouraged to take on management and leadership roles.
Students work closely with displaced young people and their families, running inspiring activities, dealing with difficult behaviour, and building strong working relationships with vulnerable and isolated people.
In the early part of this year, we surveyed STAR volunteers, and asked them whether their experiences working with the organisation had made them feel more confident in the practice of key skills which are important in the current version of Tomorrow's Doctors.
We asked 80 of the volunteers a number of questions, including how much time they spent volunteering, and whether volunteering had made them more confident in some key areas. Forty four students replied, who made different levels of volunteering commitment, all of whom felt that they had benefited from their time with the organisation.
The majority of medical students who volunteered said that they had learnt something which might help in future practice and reported that their involvement had improved their confidence in a variety of ways which could help with their development, both academic and in practice:
- working with refugees and asylum seekers
- working with children
- communicating with people with limited English
- working in partnership with vulnerable people
- working in teams.
GMC-commissioned research on the preparedness of new F1 doctors for their first post showed that many of the F1s surveyed felt that they lacked some of the team-working and leadership skills that they need to practise effectively (http://www.gmc-uk.org/about/research). Student volunteering represents one way for students to learn safely how to make a difference.
Christopher Hands, Chair, Board of Trustees, Klevis Kola Foundation
Tim Little, Chair, Student Action for Refugees