Paramedicine Internships Abroad

On your EMS internship in Ghana, you’ll be focused on assisting with emergency care. Common cases include: RTAs, hernias, ectopias, hypo- and hyperglycemia, severe diarrhea, convulsions, and fractures. Certain sociocultural factors in Ghana affect how emergency care is delivered. So, there’s much less urgency in the ED than you’re familiar with. There’s a lack of resources here too, and that means local staff have to get creative with what they do have. If you're looking for a paramedic internship in Africa, Ghana is an excellent option.

You will undertake your paramedicine 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.

On your internship in Vietnam you’ll spend time in a teaching hospital. In the hospital’s ED you’ll see RTA’s, trauma, and cases of unfamiliar diseases. A lot of patients travel in from Vietnam’s most rural areas, so you’ll see that the patient demographic is mixed. This placement is unique in that Vietnamese hospitals use modern practices alongside more traditional approaches. You’ll see treatments you’ve never seen before. If you want to do a paramedic internship in Asia, Vietnam is an incredible option.

Do your EMT internship in the Philippines and spend time in the ED, OBG emergency, and surgery. To give you some sense of scale, the ED here serves the whole island. You’ll start to see differences in both practice and resource from day one. Manual intubation is one example, and a lack of anesthesia is another. Patients typically present much later than you’re probably used to. And family members undertake a lot of bedside and general care — bagging for example. You’ll see cases of respiratory failure, gastroenteritis, burns, rabies, hernias, and hyperglycemia.

In Dar es Salaam, experience in the ED is a given, but you can also spend time in surgery. You do your internship here in a national referral hospital that hosts the city’s main ED. That means you’ll often see critical emergency cases. This is the only department of its kind in Tanzania, so some cases come from hundreds of miles away to be seen — this altogether redefines the idea of an ‘emergency’. You’ll see a lot of variance; sepsis (and multi-organ failure), acute respiratory distress syndrome, cerebral malaria, metabolic disorders, polytrauma, blunt trauma, and penetrating trauma too.