Medical Volunteer Program in Kenya

Who this programme is for

This programme is open to qualified, registered doctors and nurses — and to registered midwives, clinical officers and other licensed healthcare professionals. You will need to be fully qualified and currently registered with your national regulator (the GMC or NMC in the UK, or the equivalent body in your country).

It is not a student elective. If you are a medical, nursing or pre-med student looking for an elective placement, our sister brand Med Trips runs programmes designed specifically for students, with the supervision and sign-off that university placements require.

About the programme

The Medical Volunteer Program in Kenya places qualified clinicians in hospitals and clinics in and around suburban Nairobi. You will work alongside Kenyan doctors, clinical officers and nurses who manage a caseload very different from the one you are used to — often with far fewer resources, and with presentations you may rarely see at home, including advanced infectious disease, late-presenting pathology and trauma.

Most placements are in smaller hospitals and Level 3 and Level 4 district hospitals, some in suburban Nairobi and some serving informal settlements. The work is genuinely useful to the teams you join, and for most volunteers it is also a serious professional experience: seeing how clinical decisions are made when imaging, laboratory turnaround and drug availability cannot be assumed.

How your department is allocated

This is the main thing to understand before you apply: you cannot choose your department in advance. Placements are allocated by the hospital, based on where they need clinical support during the weeks you are there, and on what your registration and experience allow you to do. The clinical leads make that decision on arrival, and rotations between departments are at their discretion.

We will always pass on your areas of interest, and in practice most participants do spend time in more than one department over a longer placement. But we will not promise you a specific ward, speciality or theatre list before you travel, and you should not book this programme expecting one.

Where you will be placed

Your placement is assigned according to availability and logistics at the time you travel. Departments that commonly host volunteers include outpatients, accident & emergency, maternity, obstetrics & gynaecology, general wards, internal medicine, paediatrics, the burns unit, surgery and theatre, the critical care unit, counselling, pharmacy and the laboratory.

Sample placement — Tigoni District Hospital. Tigoni is a Level 4 district hospital in Kiambu West, in the Limuru constituency, with more than 200 beds and cots across inpatient and outpatient departments. Services include antenatal care, caesarean section, immunisation, tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment, family planning, radiology and antiretroviral therapy. Patient numbers vary considerably day to day. This is one example only — you may be placed at another hospital in or around Nairobi.

Transport to and from your placement is not included in the programme fee. Your local coordinator will suggest the most practical options; most volunteers use Uber or Bolt and share the cost, and we suggest budgeting around $5–$7 per day.

Your role on placement

What you do depends on your qualification, your experience and the judgement of the supervising clinician. As a registered professional you will usually be given more responsibility than a student would be, but the hospital still decides what is appropriate, and patient consent applies as it would anywhere. In practice volunteers support ward rounds, clinics and theatre lists, take histories and observations, assist with procedures within their scope of practice, and share knowledge with local colleagues.

You should arrive expecting to work within the local system rather than to change it, and to be supernumerary rather than to hold independent clinical responsibility. Volunteers who get the most from the placement are the ones who are useful, adaptable and willing to learn from staff who do a great deal with very little.