3 Steps for Beginning a Career in Healthcare with a Young Family
If you’re looking for a career path that will allow you to juggle the responsibilities of a young family alongside creating a positive impact every day, a career in medicine and healthcare might be for you!
There are many different routes into this career path. The NHS alone is the biggest employer in Europe with 1.3 million employees, so you will never be short of a job opportunity, and there are the benefits of dynamic shift patterns, career stability and diverse opportunities.
Here are five steps to securing a rewarding medical and healthcare career that will allow you to spend every day making a life changing difference while supporting your young family.
Get Work Experience
The more experience on your CV, the better. In order to gain valuable healthcare work experience, you can find a jobs like a Healthcare Assistant role in the NHS to build your experience of working with patients.
Standard duties of Healthcare Assistants include washing, dressing and feeding patients, as well as taking and recording their vital signs and helping with mobility.
You could also train as a Support Worker, who work to support individuals living in sheltered accommodation or care homes. This role carries more emphasis on caring for well-being and helping vulnerable people live as independently as possible.
Some roles involve significant amounts of assistance with physical disabilities, while others will work more with mental health support.
Get Qualified
If you’re looking for a formal qualification, you may want to invest in a university degree in medicine and healthcare.
If you already have a degree in a relevant field, or extensive knowledge and work experience, you may want to look into a Masters degree like the MSc Medical and Healthcare course with Anglia Ruskin University.
This will equip you with everything you need for a successful medical or healthcare career including work experience, critical analysis, educational theory, leadership and a research project.
This course is also studied remotely over two years, meaning that you can study flexibly in your own time and still work to earn and gain essential work experience while completing your course.
This also means that you can also arrange any time spent studying around any childcare responsibilities you may have.
Graduate Programmes
The NHS runs a Graduate Management Scheme to help graduates progress towards becoming a senior manager.
This course specialises in general management, finance, human resources, health informatics, policy and strategy, or health analysis.
It runs for 2.5 years and contains specialist training, work placements, and management development, but also contains a mix of patient-facing hospital roles or data development office-based positions, meaning that there’s something out there for everyone.
Many NHS trusts have on-site creches and nurseries that offer support for childcare for children under five years old. In addition, salary sacrifice schemes offer tax-free childcare vouchers for increased support.