Planning your elective - diving medicine

Mark Wilson gives some tips on how to arrange a diving holiday...sorry, elective placement

Medicine is your passport to travel the world, and your elective is a time when you can immerse (no pun intended) yourself in another culture --maybe for the first time. But it is even more than that: you can work in any specialty or aspect of medicine, however obscure. You might consider this the guide to the ultimate diving holiday, but it is written to help provide contacts for those that really are interested in the medical aspects of diving.

When thinking about applying to a particular institution consider which components of diving medicine interest you. Do you want diving research (mainly physiology), training (medic diver qualifications), performing "fitness to dive" medical examinations, or do you want to treat diving related injuries? Bear in mind, however, that the provision of care is only necessary if there is a problem: basing yourself at a site which has only a decompression chamber may not provide weeks of activity. Ideally, you should be somewhere that provides many aspects of diving medicine or somewhere with an affiliated hospital enabling you to see other patients as well. Being in the navy opens another avenue.

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General diving medical sites

Diving Medicine Online This excellent (though difficult to navigate) site has information on everything from diving with asthma to diving with a coronary stent. It also lists all the decompression chambers and dive medicine centres country by country. www.gulftel.com/[sim ]scubadoc

Divers' Alert Network This website gives safety advice to civilian divers and information on training and research. www.diversalertnetwork.org

The Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine Society The members of this international, non-profit making organisation are mostly doctors and hyperbaric scientists. www.uhms.org

European Underwater and Baromedical Society The society publishes the European Journal of Underwater and Hyperbaric Medicine. www.eubs.org

United Kingdom

Diving Disease Research Centre, Plymouth The centre is affiliated with the Derriford Hospital and has become a leader in diving physiology research since the 1980s (in areas such as diving with diabetes, disabilities, and asthma). The research centre runs extensive training programmes and treats decompression illness, carbon monoxide and cyanide poisoning, smoke inhalation, and soft tissue infections, such as necrotising fasciitis. www.ddrc.org

The National Hyperbaric Centre This centre, located in Aberdeen, is a leading hyperbaric testing, training, and research centre. It provides medical cover for a large part of northeastern Scotland including the commercial divers of the oil and gas industry. www.demon.co.uk/hyperbar

Scottish Diving Medicine This is the homepage of the recompression chambers in Scotland that provide care for NHS patients with diving related illness. www.sams.ac.uk/sdm

Red Sea

The Sharm El Sheikh Hyperbaric Medical Centre Based in the busiest dive area of the Red Sea, the centre is happy to take elective students and foreign doctors (for more information see the elective report by Kevin Bailey: www.studentbmj.com/back_issues/1001/life/385.html) www.danegypt.org

Saudi Arabia

This site lists dozens of dive centres in Saudi Arabia. www.saudidiving.com/dive-centers.htm

United States

There are many academic centres with interests in diving medicine in the United States. The Divers' Alert Network (based at Duke University) is a good place to start. Also look at Diving Medicine Online (see above).

Australia and the South Pacific

The South Pacific Underwater Medicine Society This is the main site for Oceania with information on dive centres in the region and courses that tend to be run in Australia. It also has a journal section where you may be able to find who is doing the type of research you are interested in. www.spums.org.au

The Luganville Hospital, Luganville, Espirito Santo Island, Vanuatu This hospital has the hyperbaric chamber for the Pacific islands and can provide fantastic electives.

Other useful websites

The British Sub Aqua Club. www.bsac.com

All the above links and further information on dive and adventure medicine can be found at

Mark Wilson, author of The medic's guide to work and electives around the world, University College Hospital, London
Email: mark@medicstravel.com

Mark Wilson runs www.medicstravel.com as well as being a keen diver.

studentBMJ 2002;10:45-88 March ISSN 0966-6494