Gap Medics Information

What is Gap Medics? Gap Medics is a specialist organisation, dedicated to providing clinical shadowing experiences for aspiring medical students. These experiences help our students to make better-informed decisions about their education and future career paths, as well as providing a valuable learning platform to help them prepare for university applications and interviews. We operate residential programs in various parts of the world, working closely with carefully selected partner hospitals to provide safe, meaningful and well-supervised clinical placements. What makes our placements so valuable is our system of mentoring, pairing each student with an experienced health professional who serves as their personal guide and inspiration throughout the experience. Our Story Our story began in 2005, when founder Dave Brown and his friend Omar Mohamed set up a program to support final-year medical students wanting to broaden their experience with an overseas placement before graduating. The success of that program - Work the World - led to interest from students at an earlier stage of their education, who wanted shadowing experience before they began their clinical training. The result was the formation in 2010 of a new program with an exclusive focus on observational experience for pre-clinical healthcare students. The new program - Gap Medics - opened with a single site hosting up to 14 students in the town of Iringa in Tanzania, East Africa. Gap Medics expanded rapidly, introducing programs in India, St Lucia, Thailand and Czech Republic. By 2014, we operated three sites in Tanzania alone, hosting up to 225 students at one time in peak season and providing livelihoods for more than 50 permanent local staff. Evolution has been central to our success, and every year changes in local conditions, politics and many other factors have created opportunities for us to open new locations - sometimes expanding our portfolio, and sometimes replacing older programs.