Clinical Placements In Vietnam

On a medical elective in Vietnam, you can choose to get experience in a range of departments. These include OBG, internal medicine, A&E, and general and orthopaedic surgery. You can also spend time in oncology, which offers particular insight. Modern medicines are greatly respected, but unregulated in many areas. For instance, there have been cases of children suffering from arsenic poisoning having been given contaminated baby formula. Chronic malnutrition is relatively common in paediatric patients, and there are huge volumes of patients involved in RTAs. Hue is a fantastic choice if you’re looking for a medical elective in Asia. As of 2024, you can also rotate in our partner hospital's dermatology department. 

Our partner institution in Hue, Vietnam is a university teaching hospital, making it the perfect place to undertake your clinical placement. Alongside nurses, medics and fellow midwives and midwifery students, you’ll get first hand insight into a Vietnamese OBG department. From pre and postnatal care to attending and assisting in live births, you’ll see exactly how local professionals use ingenuity to deliver care with limited resources. Seeing how traditional Vietnamese culture influences local practices will be a highlight.

Based in a university teaching hospital, the rehabilitation department in our partner institution has decades of experience training physiotherapists. Under the supervision of local specialists, you can assist with the rehabilitation of a breadth of conditions. These could include everything from severe burns to paediatric spina bifida caused by the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. This is an exceptional opportunity to learn how an impressive level of care is provided, despite resource limitations.

Choose Hue for your biomedical science placement and you could get specialised lab experience in areas like microbiology, haematology, and immunology among others. Our partner university hospital even hosts a Medical Science degree, so local staff are experienced not only in practising but also in teaching the discipline. Time in oncology could prove particularly insightful, and you can see the results of a lack of regulation in cases like arsenic poisoning in infants who have ingested unregulated baby formula.

The 3000-bed university teaching hospital we’ve partnered with in Hue is the perfect place to undertake your nursing placement. You can choose to spend time in a range of departments — the emergency department, paediatrics, psychiatry, oncology, the reproductive endocrinology and infertility centre, and the center for gastrointestinal endoscopy among others. The Vietnamese traditional medicine department is eye-opening, and you’ll see how traditional techniques complement more contemporary practises.

Paramedic science placements in Vietnam are fascinating as traditional medicine is built right into the healthcare system. This means you’ll see how modern practises complement ancient traditions. In our partner hospital’s A&E department you’ll see cases like RTAs and trauma, and even unfamiliar diseases. Many patients travel in from some of Vietnam’s most rural areas, so the patient demographic (and the conditions they present) will be mixed.

Our partner institution in Hue is a university teaching hospital where you can learn what it’s like to practice radiography in a low-resource setting. Much of the diagnostic equipment in the hospital is out of date, and some machines that better-funded hospitals might take for granted do not exist at all. While equipment may be lacking, local staff have adapted techniques to make up for the limitations a lack of equipment imposes. This will teach you how to be resourceful in ways you might not have previously considered.

A pharmacy placement in our partner hospital in Hue will highlight the limitations poor funding places on the pharmacy provision. The resource gap is particularly notable when it comes to pharmacy as a discipline — certain medicines have extremely limited availability, while others are non-existent. This has an obvious impact on patients in that they don’t have access to crucial medicines that could help them recover. Unique to our programme in Hue, you’ll also be able to observe traditional Vietnamese medicinal practices being used alongside more contemporary techniques.