Long story short - due to my circumstances in college (family financial struggles, having to graduate early, etc.) I was unable to have a clinical volunteer position during school. I have 300+ hours of non-clinical volunteering that I am extremely passionate about but technically no clinical volunteer work. For the last year, I have worked 40+ hours a week as a clinical research coordinator in a cancer center - every day I meet with patients and work closely with each doctor in the clinic. I personally think this has given me better clinical experience than any volunteer position would have and I will have had the position for about 2 years by the time I start school. However, I'm nervous that schools are going to see that I don't have anything that qualifies as volunteer work in that setting and it's going to be a red flag. I have 5 months of experience as an unpaid clinical research intern where I was working closely with patients but it seems like a stretch to add that to a volunteer section. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Clinical Volunteering Question
- Thread starter eelisa
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As I said in the post, I have a job right now where every week I spend 40+ hours either working with patients, their doctors, or doing administrative work to make sure their lives are as easy as possible. It's meaningful work that has shown me a lot of the realities of working in medicine and it has definitely helped me decide that medicine is what I want to pursue.
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I believe I read before that clinical work is good in lieu of clinical volunteering. It is meant to expose you to the medical field. I have 3 years nursing experience, 5 if you include exposure during school. I hope I don't need clinical volunteering on top of that.
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Clinical research of the type the OP is describing is not really research, or if it is, it is very low level in terms of the OP's contribution to the scientific methods. Therefore, I'd classify this as clinical employment. Just the fact that the OP described the people as "patients" and says that the work is alongside physicians who are providing clinical services sold me on it.
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This is not "working with patients"; they're research subjects.
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It is a gray zone... If they are getting usual care for cancer or some chronic condition and you are adding a study drug in addition to usual care then they are patients and they have a medical record and they are being billed for services not covered by the research, I'd say they are patients and that is a clinical experience. If you are doing fMRI on healthy people to see what part of their brain lights up when they think about donuts (the Homer Simpson study), well, I wouldn't call that clinical.
