Clinical Placements In Zambia

On a medical elective in Zambia, you have every chance to see unfamiliar conditions like acute malaria and sickle cell. You can also gain experience in Southern Africa’s only cancer and diseases referral hospital, and in the fast-paced emergency department, as well as seeing the impact HIV and related conditions have had on resources (including mother-to-child transmission of the disease). You will also see how these limited resources make things that are preventable in Australia, much more serious. As an example, you’ll see that diarrhoea is the single biggest mortality risk for children under 5. Lusaka offers plenty of opportunities if you’re looking for a medical elective in Africa.

Our nursing program in Lusaka takes place in our four-in-one partner hospital. There’s the adult hospital, paediatric hospital, mother and newborn hospital, and the cancer and diseases hospital. The flexibility built into our placements means you’ll have the option of rotating through all of the above (if you choose). You can get experience with conditions like glaucoma, malnutrition, paediatric HIV, clubfoot and cervical cancer — one of the most significant causes of death amongst women in Zambia. You can also get experience in the renal units, burns units and non-communicable disease units.

At our partner hospital, you’ll learn just how different the Zambian approach to midwifery can be. As Zambian mothers often prefer to give birth in larger hospitals rather than rural lying-in clinics, the per-day number of births is normally high. Breech births and other emergency birthing situations, as well as mothers with HIV, malnutrition and a host of other complications, are all things you can expect to see. Midwifery placements with Work the World are truly unique, and you can even get involved in prenatal and postnatal care programs run by the hospital.

You’ll spend most of your placement in our partner hospital’s busy physiotherapy department. This is where you can learn from a team of seasoned professionals. Alongside this team you can do things like treat repeat patients, spend time in the clubfoot clinic, see patients with neurological disorders like strokes and Bell’s palsy, amputees, burns patients, spend time in the hospital’s custom gym, spend time in orthopaedics and respiratory therapy, and even see how the hospital creates its own prostheses. It’s a diverse placement to say the least.

Rather than paramedics, drivers with no clinical experience drive the ambulances in Lusaka. That means emergency cases are addressed only when they arrive at hospital. Also, your placement hospital’s A&E department is the city’s major trauma centre. Consider both of those facts and you see that you have the opportunity for an eye-opening placement in Zambia. Patients are typically from economically disadvantaged areas, so the impact that has on both cases and care will be obvious to you.

The radiography department in our Zambian partner hospital sees up to 300 patients each day. For you, this means there’s a wealth of experience to be had. Patients are commonly referred here from smaller clinics in surrounding communities. This means you can get experience observing and analysing conditions at a range of levels of advancement. The department is well-equipped by local standards, but also utilises analogue technologies — there are power cuts from time to time. As such, you can learn techniques like developing X-rays in the hospital’s darkroom. You can also get more specialised experience in the cancer and diseases hospital upon request.

It might surprise you to learn that on a pharmacy placement in Lusaka, local standards are similar to those found in hospitals back home. That said, lack of access to certain medicines and low staffing levels hamper progress. On your placement, you’ll check scripts, undertake clinical rounds, and spend time in dispensaries found in the paediatric, adult and mother and newborn hospitals, as well as in surgery. The hospital also synthesises its own chemotherapy drugs — a process you could get direct experience with.

Clinical experience in our partner hospital in Lusaka is unique for dentistry students. Alongside local specialists you’ll attend busy daily clinics for patients who often struggle to meet the costs of treatment. Fortunately, our partner hospital is one of a kind in Lusaka in that patients can obtain free or low-cost treatments. The department carries out many standard procedures — like restorations and fillings — but, due to a lack of awareness of oral hygiene, patients commonly present late. As such, many cases will be much more advanced than you’ve seen at home. Observing maxillofacial surgery is also possible.