Our Story

Our story began in 2005, when Directors Dave Brown and Omar Mohamed founded our sister company, Work The World, to help final-year medical students gain work experience in Africa and Asia.

By 2009, Work the World had established itself as the UK’s leading provider of international healthcare student placements and now sends over 1,000 students to destinations across Africa, Asia and South America each year.

As our reputation grew, we received increasing interest from students seeking work experience before starting their medical or nursing course – whether in the final years of school, on pre-med degree courses or taking gap years. In December 2009, we separated the pre-med and pre-nursing programmes from those aimed at final-year students so as to ensure we could offer placements designed around the specific needs of those without previous clinical experience… And so began Gap Medics.

Director profile: Dave Brown

Dave’s passion for combining responsible travel with useful work began with spending a year volunteering in South Africa at the age of 18. After graduating from the University of Southampton n Aeronautics and Astronautics, he began a career in the volunteer and travel sector that has involved working for extended periods throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. Between 2002 and 2004 Dave headed the flagship Ghana programme for a major gap year volunteer organisation, later progressing to Operations Director at one of the UK’s leading ethical adventure travel companies.

Based in our Newcastle office, Dave continues to play a leading role in all Gap Medics programmes, in particular negotiating all of our hospital partnership agreements, training our Programme Managers and monitoring quality of service.

Director profile: Omar Mohamed

Prior to co-founding Work the World in 2005, Omar worked in the gap year industry promoting responsible travel for six years. His career has involved working for extensive periods of time in eleven destinations, which span North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. During this time Omar was arranging, developing and overseeing work-experience projects in the fields of social welfare, education, health and conservation.

Omar currently heads the Brighton office of our sister company, Work the World, organising international placements for final-year medical students, but retains an active involvement in developing and promoting Gap Medics.