Paramedic Placements Abroad

Go to Ghana for a paramedicine placement abroad and your focus will be on emergency care.  RTAs are common, and you could see hernias, ectopias, hypo- and hyperglycemia, severe diarrhoea, convulsions, and fractures. Socio-cultural circumstances affect how local staff deliver emergency care in Ghana. For example, there’s much less of a sense of urgency in A&E. The lack of resources in our partner hospital means learning how to be creative with the outdated equipment you do have access to.

You will undertake your paramedic science placement in Kandy's most prominent hospital for accident, emergency, and trauma patients. In the Emergency Treatment Unit, which, as you will see, has a very limited bed capacity, the volume of patients often exceeds the number of beds. So, most patients are treated while on trollies. You will almost certainly see resuscitations, but there are other treatments like anti-rabies serum administration and anti-venom administration that will be nothing like what you're used to at home.

While you're abroad in Vietnam, you’ll spend time in the A&E department of our partner hospital. RTAs and trauma are common. Many patients travel in from some of the most remote areas in Vietnam, so you’ll see that the patient demographic is mixed. Even more interestingly, you’ll also see how modern practices complement ancient traditions.

You’ll spend time in A&E, OBG emergency, and surgery on your paramedic placement abroad in Iloilo. The A&E department here is busy. It’s the general emergency room for the entire island. You’ll see differences in both resource and practise. Manual intubation and a lack of anaesthesia are two examples. Another key difference is that patients’ families do a surprising amount of the patient care — bagging for example. You’ll see a diversity of cases here too; respiratory failure, gastroenteritis, burns, rabies, hernias, and hyperglycemia are some examples.

In Dar es Salaam, you can get experience in both A&E and surgery. On a paramedic placement here, you’ll be in the city’s main A&E department within a national referral hospital. That means you’ll often see critical cases. This is the only department of its kind in Tanzania, so patients will travel for miles to be seen, even in an emergency. You’ll see a diversity of cases; sepsis with multi-organ failure, acute respiratory distress syndrome, cerebral malaria, metabolic disorders, polytrauma, blunt trauma, and penetrating trauma among others.

You’ll get experience in a busy emergency department if you undertake your paramedic science placement in Kathmandu. There is a local ambulance service, but patients find their own way to hospital more often than not. This means patients rarely get on-scene or in-ambulance treatment before they arrive — often critically injured — at hospital. As well as trauma cases, you’ll see a number of late-stage conditions. As there is no primary care in Nepal, patients often use the emergency department like a GP surgery.