Sponsorship and grants for medical students
To broaden the understanding of occupational health amongst the medical and nursing professions, we provide a number of grants, bursaries and sponsorship programmes for eligible students.
We’ve highlighted the schemes we run below, which are available for UK based students who are in the second year of a relevant medical or nursing qualification (with the exception of The Sue Britton Bursary, which is for final year students). If we make an award to you, you won’t need to pay any of the money back. To apply, you’ll need to be able to show that you are participating in a relevant course and provide a reference from your tutor.
We make awards in a number of different categories, although they’re usually focussed on academic achievement and/or for those on lower incomes.
Due to the number of applications we receive, we are sadly only able to contact those applicants who are successful in their submissions.
Applications are also restricted to those studying to be doctors or nurses and we sadly do not accept applications from dental students, students not enrolled at a UK institution or other healthcare specialists.
Grants for electives
Electives are short-term placements where medical students can learn by assisting in real healthcare situations. Although we don’t currently provide physical placements in occupational health settings for students, we do provide £250 grants for eligible students to participate in an elective in the UK or abroad.
The grants are intended to contribute to travel and/or living costs during the elective. The awards are weighted towards those who can demonstrate they are (or have succeeded despite being) on lower incomes.
The electives must already have been organised by the applicant and confirmation of the approval or participation must be provided as part of the application process.
Academic Achievement Grant
We are pleased to recognise and encourage academic achievement in the medical and nursing professions by awarding discretionary £250 awards for outstanding academic success. We particularly welcome applications from those on lower incomes, who have overcome significant disadvantage (social, economic, medical, physical or psychological) to achieve success and from those who were educated outside the independent schools system.
The Sue Britton Bursary
Sue Britton was a double-lung transplantee who passed away in 2020. She worked in occupational health for many years.
To those who knew her, she embodied the most positive disposition and held humanity (and her two dogs) in the highest regard. To honour her memory, we are pleased to provide a £1,000 bursary for students in the final year of any nursing or medical degree.
To be eligible for the award, you should be able to demonstrate courage in the face of adversity or hardship.
Important information
If you wish to make an application for any of our schemes, please do bear this advice in mind:
- Check which scheme you are applying for – if you apply for the Sue Britton Bursary to request assistance for an elective the application will not be processed
- Punctuation, spelling and presentation is important – if your application is entirely in lower case, includes poor spelling and has no breaks for paragraphs, it is unlikely to succeed
- ChatGPT – if you use AI to create your application we counsel checking it closely, because applications with [insert evidence here] are unlikely to succeed
- There is a balance to be struck between brevity and boredom – remember, the applications are read and scored by a human, so you need to include enough narrative to make your application compelling, but not so much that it becomes difficult to absorb and understand
- You must be enrolled at a UK institution to be eligible, sadly we cannot accept applications from overseas
- We will contact you if you are successful in your application, sadly we cannot contact every applicant, because of the numbers of applications we receive