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Your Volunteering Options

We divide our volunteering options into two categories. Each offers advantages in terms of flexibility, security, autonomy, and the effectiveness of your trip. We hope this will help you to choose the trip that suits you best.

Self-Organised Placements

Many of the profiles in our destinations section include contact details for the relevant hospital or organisation. This enables you to contact them directly to organise a visit (email addresses are hidden to prevent spam, but just email us and we will put you in touch). This option gives you complete flexibility - you can negotiate the length and timing of your stay with the destination hospital.

If you are organising a trip to a one of these destinations, we recommend you read the advice in our Risk Management section. If the destination profile includes details of people who have visited this destination, then you may wish to arrange a meeting to learn more about the destination beforehand.

Remember that the purpose of volunteering is to improve healthcare in the destination country, and while short-term volunteering visits are welcomed by many hospitals, they aren't much more than a band-aid solution. Medicine Uncharted is aiming to improve the effectiveness of short-term visits by enabling past volunteers to share their experiences and thereby help new volunteers to prepare beforehand and make their visit as effective as possible. We also hope that a short-term visit may provide a 'taste' for aid work that might lead the volunteer to take up a longer-term placement with a larger organisation.

Supported Placements

The other volunteering option is a placement with a larger organisation such as AVI or MSF. This offers the advantages of logistical and financial support, along with the knowledge that you are part of a wider capacity-building program in the target country. Supported placements usually require a much larger commitment of time - typically one to two years.

The support offered typically include airfares, insurance, a pre-departure briefing, in-country language support, living allowance and emergency assistance.

Medicine Uncharted is only a small networking orgainisation, and while it is not feasible for us to 'send' volunteers ourselves, we aim to support these larger organisations by recruiting health professionals to take up the positions, and providing advice.

Hybrid options

There is room to negotiate between these two options. For example:

If we can find a group of individuals interested in the one position, we can negotiate to form a 'tag team' to take up the overall position in smaller increments.

We may be able to negotiate for individuals to attend the 'pre-departure briefing' of a larger organisation, paying a pro-rata fee.