Working as a health care assistant

About halfway through the second year of my medical degree I started to panic. What if I could not cope with the smell of a hospital? Or could not bear to touch patients' skin? What if I entered the clinical years of my course and found that all the information I had painstakingly committed to memory was completely irrelevant? My own hospital experience was limited to some fairly hazy work shadowing and a couple of visits to elderly great aunts. Being on a traditional medical course I'd only had preclinical teaching and could not expect to encounter patients until clinical school in a year's time. I realised that I needed to gain a more useful insight into the environment that I would be working in.

The best way to do this, I thought, was to work on the wards, so I contacted my local hospital and asked for an application …