Clinical Hours

What are Clinical Hours?

For the purposes of medical schools, clinical activities are any medical related activities where you are directly interacting with patients. This is separate from shadowing, scribing, and clinical research.

What are Some Clinical Activities?

Clinical hours are imperative for you to have on your application. Having experience in clinical settings will not only be essential for your application, but it will help you understand whether or not medicine is the right field for you. There are several ways to get clinical hours, with some being more time intensive than others. As long as you have direct patient care (ie. you are directly speaking with patients and helping them in some clinical setting), you are probably fine. Make sure to have a lot of hours in this field (200-300 hours at least).

Here are some activities you can do to fulfill this:

• Hospital Volunteering
  • This is one of the "easiest" ways to get your hours because it's usually a once a week commitment for 3-4 hours and you can do it during the school year. Ensure that you won’t be doing administrative tasks and you are actually interacting with patients.
  
  
• EMT
  • This will require a course the summer before you can start so keep that in mind when you're planning out your activities.
  
  
• Medical Assistant
  • Several people do this over their gap years because it provides you with insight into doctors' day to day lives and allows for the most patient interaction. One thing to note is that some places may require a course certification before you apply.
  
  
• Hospice Volunteering
  • This can provide another dimension to your healthcare perspective, but I wouldn’t have this as your only clinical care opportunity
  
  
• Phlebotomy
  • This will require outside training so you can take a course over the summer and work during the school year. Some people I know did this through their on-campus VA (veterans) hospital. Though they had to go through additional background checks, their training was done through the hospital system directly.