For Berlin (BCRT):

Minimum requirements: Registered M.D., seminar in travel medicine (4 days, price reduction possible), no specialisation needed.

Working hours: Weekdays 14-19h, Saturday 12-17h

Money: 34 EUR/h

You can find a detailed story about this job here.

Details on scores

You do work with patients, even though it is directed on prevention rather than cure and it evolves around usually healthy subjects too.

As it is a freelance job it comes with a lot of flexibility.

Freetime is up to you and your need of money. Even though there are not enough available shifts to earn a sufficient income.

The team is very friendly and atmosphere is good. Any questions are always welcome. There have been some activities for special occasions and seminars.

Some Karma points for prevention of disease and education in behavioural measures.

The responsibility is quiet high as you work independently. There are guidelines and generally advised practice you should follow, but in the end every case is different. And you don’t want some 20 year old to return to a nursery home because you forgot to tell him he should consider a shot against japanese enzephalitis when he planned to sleep in a rice field in Thailand for 3 months.

There is not a lot of diversity. You can see travel trends reflect in advice seeking of course. Thus we know the health demographics of India, Thiland, Myanmar and some places in Africa by heart. Anyway the interesting cases can be very interesting too and still there is always some non-evident questions.

I learned a lot of things that interest me personally since I work there. There are always seminars, interesting talks and update emails on the current world health situation. Also a certain amount of knowledge is necessary for doing the job.

As I said in the story, the mind starts to travel every day you work.

I find the work very inspiring personally. I get travel inspiration from patients and medical inspiration from the boss and colleagues all the time. It involves politics, medicine and culture and that is what I love about it.

It is all about medical content, even though in daily practice not of the most sophisticated type. The contracted colleagues do see a returning traveller once in a while and do the tropic suitability exams, so they dive a bit deeper into the medical themes.

There is no real evidence against security, but you do deal with needles and vaccines. Someone might get sick of the yellow fever shot.

The payment per hour is around average for a non-specialised young doctor. Finance is not a real big deal as all the consultations are paid privately.

The good thing about being a freelance doc here, only giving travellers advice is, you do not have to write long letters. Information on diseases are preprinted for hand-out. The only thing are the vaccination books for charge-no. So bureaucracy as in the hospital is far fetched.