Medics2Mongolia (please click on the link to see their website) is a not-for-profit organisation set up by medical students from Nottingham University in 2012. It has since grown into a charity-elective organisation that sets up elective placements in Mongolian hospitals for medical students, in exchange for teaching English to the health care staff. This arrangement was established on the basis that health care professionals in Mongolia have been stymied by lack of translation of medical books and journals from English to Mongolian. As English has only replaced Russian as the country’s second language in recent years, most adults over the age of 35 have not had formal English teaching. Medics2Mongolia decided to encourage future medical students to give free English lessons to their elective placement teams, equipped with teaching materials and resources assimilated from previous students, teachers and volunteers.

We believe that providing English teaching, instead of paying an organisation to set up an elective, is a much better use of students as resources, and guarantees that our contribution goes directly to those who need it. This also allows us to channel more of our money towards driving the ambulance to Mongolia and donating it to hospitals in need.

The quality of the elective placements is also very high, with a wide range of health care settings ranging from national trauma centres, to large district general hospitals, to small primary care clinics. We plan to each spend our placements in a different specialty, sharing our experiences with each other. If funding is successful, we hope to combine our placement with research into the relevance and suitability of medical apps (which are becomingly increasingly popular in Western medical education for both reference tools and learning purposes) with the hope of contributing towards the field of medical technology and education, and further publicising Medics2Mongolia and its cause.