<p>I am volunteering at a children's hospital but obviously I am not doing anything clinical. I visit them in their rooms, sit with them, bring them toys/games and sometimes play with them, talk to them, help them with paint/crafts, etc... things to get their mind off the fact that they are in a hospital and just let them be kids.</p>
<p>How do you actually gain clinical experience though? Other than becoming an EMT I just don't see hospitals, doctors, nurses, etc... letting you do anything clinical, in fact it seems like a liability considering us pre-meds have absolutely zero credentials. However, I see many saying to get clinical experience in their answers to posts.</p>
<p>Any ideas of how to do this, and what does clinical experience truely mean to us pre-meds who are limited to what we can truely do?</p>
<p>I'm pretty sure you can get "clinical experience."</p>
<p>I have been volunteering at a hospital for quite a while now, and I'm pretty sure it counts as clinical experience. I attend to patients, feed them, stock linen, break down patient information charts, discharge patients, etc., and get experience on my floor (I'm on the kidney/dialysis unit).</p>
<p>I think if you volunteer at a hospital, you should be okay. (though i'm not sure if children's hospital counts?) also, i think you should spend some time (maybe summer/winter break) at a medical research lab. I was a research assistant at a cancer lab over the summer, and i think that counts as clinical/research experience.</p>
<p>By the way, what are the actual "requirements" of med school? I know you have to take the MCATs and certain classes, but what do you need as far as experience goes?</p>
<p>First of all, anything where you're interacting with patients is clinical experience.</p>
<p>Secondly, I think you are missing the point of why med schools require these types of experiences. They don't care about how much technical knowledge you have. You're not going to know how to perform surgery or how to critically analyze a CT. Heck, you won't even learn much of that in med school. What do you learn in med school?</p>
<p>1) Medical ethics-how doctors make decisions in difficult cases (what if a 13 year old refuses a highly beneficial treatment and her decision is supported by her parents, what do you do?)</p>
<p>2) How to speak to patients-this is much harder than it sounds. Every med school will spend weeks teaching you and having you practice speaking with patients. It begins with making sure the door is closed before calling out the patient's name (to respect their privacy) and ends with asking them "anything else?" (since statistics show that patients come in with an average of 3-5 complaints)</p>
<p>This is the stuff you're supposed to be observing and learning during your hospital volunteering and shadowing experiences. It's not about getting to take blood pressures or palpitate abdomens. Even if you're stuck at the nurses station, observe how they interact with patients. What works? What only makes the patients angrier? These are the things you are tested on in med school. Every week we practice talking to patients in various scenarios (patients can be mad/sad/depressed/whatever) with 3 of my classmates and a faculty member critiquing me and at the end of the encounter we are always asked what worked (what we did well) and what didn't work and what we need to improve on.</p>
<p>Well considering I am typing this from my research lab while doing an experiment I think I have the research portion down (not being sarcastic, just enjoy the irony). I am a graduate student doing research on drug delivery with smart pH responsive polymers targeting cancer cells. I am currently working on getting enough data to submit an abstract to a conference in February and will hopefully have a paper submitted for publishing this spring/summer.</p>
<p>norcalguy, I'm guessing you're already in med school?</p>
<p>So let me ask you, what experience did you have when you started applying to med school?</p>
<p>Also, I guess what you're saying is right. I mean, no one really gives merit to interaction with patients and the importance of communication. Knowing how to talk to a patient and getting information without bothering the patient is a skill that requires much practice.</p>
<p>Norcalguy, I understand why it is necessary to volunteer in these environments. I was just falsely lead to think that there was a difference between my experience volunteering in the children's hospital to "clinical" experienced based on others posts saying "Make sure you have plenty of clinical experience" after they clearly stated they have been volunteering in a medical environment.</p>
<p>td: The LCME requires every med school to have a "doctoring" course in order to be accredited so even if HSers and premeds don't put much stock in communication, med schools do. I didn't have a ton of clinical experience (50 hours shadowing, 200 hours or so in the hospital-kinda ho hum) but it's not about the number of hours you accumulate. 500 hours stapling paper is still 500 hours stapling paper.</p>
<p>MEG-nope, anytime you are in a medical environment and are within 5 feet of a patient, that's clinical experience you can put down on an application. Obviously, how much you get out of it is up to you.</p>
<p>I've been volunteering in an ER for two months now, 3 hrs/week. I seem to be stuck on only doing things like "stapling paper". How should I get out of this habit and actually start making the ER volunteering experience something worthwhile to talk about in interview? I'm aware that I should be doing things NCG mentioned above, but is that how you start out?</p>
<p>Translating for patients a useful clinical function the pre-meds or even high school students can perform. While it is preferable to use a professional translator, many hospitals make do with volunteers. If you speak a common or uncommon foreign language, you can enhance your value by learning common medical terms.</p>
<p>Another unskilled volunteer position that involves real patient contact is rocking and holding neonates in the nursery.</p>
<p>A minimally skilled, but respected traditional position is working as phlebotomist.</p>
<p>BTW, as a non-traditional applicant, you need not jump through all the traditional hoops. Your strength is your engineering and hard science prowess: presenting yourself as a legitimate scientist with an interest in medicine will likely sell better than presenting yourself as a titular scientist who navigated the pre-med hoops.</p>