My medical elective in Melbourne, Australia: Northern Health (6th July-31st July 2015): Part 1 ( all about application and paperworks)

Hey peeps ! so here is my medical elective experience in Melbourne, Australia.  Let's get the journey started !:)

My medical elective took place back in July 2015, it was a 4 weeks elective and we are able to choose whichever country and whatever discipline you are interested in. 

The reasons I chose to carry out my elective in Australia were: 

1) It's the nearest from Malaysia 

2) It is the cheapest (compare to Singapore, UK and US) 

3) Wanted to experience overseas health care system 

If you are reading this and planning to apply for an attachment, my advise is start planning earlier and research about which state you wish to go. I chose to apply my elective under Melbourne University program because so far they have a more complete guide to help you during the process and I will attached the link here: http://medicine.unimelb.edu.au/study-here/clinical_elective

From the list you can choose whichever hospital that you like and look into their program what discipline do they offer? Take note that you need to apply to each individual hospital that you are interested in, the contact e-mails are all listed in the link above.

Beware of which hospital you wish to go, some are highly demand such as Royal Melbourne Hospital, you need to start applying 1 year earlier before your exact elective date. 

As I can recall , I applied for at least 3 hospitals from the list: Royal Melbourne, Austin Health, St. Vincent and Northern Health. Waiting for the reply is quite depressing sometimes as some of the hospitals took more than a month just to reply your e-mail, so be patience :)

At the end, I got accepted for 4 weeks placement in Northern Health :General Medicine Department, 5 months before my elective started ( perks of planning early, yay~). 

After you got accepted, there still tonnes of paperwork to do including immunisation, insurance, national police check, certificate of good conduct and visa. I will listed down some useful links but mostly will be benefits for Malaysian only. ( PS: so sorry :( because I'm only familiar with the Malaysia's system)

For fellow Malaysian:

Insurance cover for malpractice and accident, I got this covered from my university I just need to pay an extra RM60. Try to contact student service department in your uni and see whether they could help.

National Police Check: If you are Malaysian, you need to get it done in Bukit Aman (national police head-quarter) and pay RM30 for it.

Certificate of good conduct: Basically you need to apply online for this and you will have a registered code, use that and trace the status whether you certificate are ready to collect. It normally takes around 2-4 weeks ( so this is the reason why you need to apply earlier). You will required to collect the certificate at Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Putrajaya. 

Online link is here: www.kln.gov.my  

Visa: Finally some benefits of becoming a Malaysian, the visa is pretty much easy to get as we only require tourist visa to carry out medical elective in most of the hospital. Apply through online system: ETA and pay will do. 

Link is here: https://www.eta.immi.gov.au/ETAS3/etas

Immunisation: It's depends on which hospital you got accepted in, Northern Health just required TB test, HIV, Hep B and C. 

Throughout the application process you would need to communicate with your elective coordinator via e-mail quite often so please check your mails for any recent update. I'm very lucky to have Ms. Mary Jason that helping me a lot throughout the process :)

Alright peeps, this will be the end for part 1 :) Hope it is helpful for u guys.

I will be writing about accommodation, transport, living environment, survival tips and overall expenses in my next post, cheers :)