Our company was born out of a passion for travel, learning, and understanding the value of international experience in healthcare.
At its origin in 2005, Global Pre-Meds was created for medical students in their final year, who wanted to gain experience in international hospitals.
Hospitality and support are the pillars that strengthen the educational experience we provide. They are absolutely central to what we do, and they are what make us unique to other medical programs abroad.
As the program gained in popularity, it sparked interest in the pre-med and pre-health student communities. They wanted doctor shadowing and global health experiences too, but did not yet have any clinical training.
We are not afraid of evolving. So we did.
We started to create programs that safely put pre-health and pre-med students directly on the frontlines with little to no medical training. We did this by implementing health and safety procedures, backed by our strong company ethics.
We have been successful because we rely on forging connections and building relationships with local partners. We don’t outsource to other companies for one-off projects – we are building permanent programs.
We invest a great deal into recruiting and training the best local people to serve as permanent directors and team members in our program locations. These connections help us implement our high standards for all of our programs.
While we began in the United Kingdom, and still have our headquarters there, most of our students started coming from the United States. This prompted another point of evolution for us in 2019, when we revamped our program to provide an experience that is valuable to American pre-med and pre-health students who value learning in a global health setting.
We have now provided international healthcare experiences to over 15,000 pre-med and pre-health students. We utilize over 15 years of experience to continue curating once in a lifetime experiences to the future healthcare professionals of the world.
All of us at Global Pre-Meds believe passionately in our model as an ethical business, which truly benefits our partner hospitals and communities as well as our students.
We have designed our programs for students who aspire to attend medical schools in countries that place great importance on medical ethics, such as the United States and the UK. We work incredibly hard with our partner hospitals to ensure that the experience is consistent with rules and attitudes in those countries.
We comply with the guidance issued by both the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the British Medical Association (BMA) on student shadowing. We actually take it a step further because our program is strictly observational, which protects the students, patients, and the hospital.
Part of your program fee goes towards paying the hospital that hosts your placement, and the doctors who serve as your mentors. Your participation helps hospitals improve the patient services they can provide. It also helps to incentivize mentors to provide a great learning experience and compensate them for their work in government hospitals, which pay less than the private sector.
Our presence also brings a number of economic benefits to the communities in which we work. We recruit our staff locally, and compensate the community members you learn from. We also source our food and supplies from the shops within the country, and spend money at local businesses for our excursions, which all helps to channel money into the country’s economy.
We take our responsibility to protect the natural world seriously, and every operational decision we make pays consideration to this. We avoid single use plastic, and provide potable drinking water so that students can refill their reusable water bottles. We also locally source as much as we can.
