Internship with KPMG - Health Advisory. By Adam Gwozdz

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to join the Health Advisory Team at KPMG for 4-weeks in August, and extremely grateful for the welcoming and engaging working environment created by the team – thank you Hilary, Sarah, Helena, and Scott. It would have been very easy for KPMG to limit my involvement to shadowing a consultancy team for the duration of my internship. Instead, I was immediately introduced to the team that I would working with and spent my first day in various meetings learning about the project objectives and my role within the team in completing them.

By being given a specific role, I was able to learn a great deal about the project, which involved a review of acute services within the NHS, and how real changes were implemented in the NHS. There were also many lessons to learn about leadership and management that seemed foreign to a medical student like me, but commonplace in the world of medical consultancy, making the workplace environment at KPMG an ideal setting for this. I also had many opportunities to apply these skills by participating in conference calls, workshops, and face-to-face meetings with project leaders, medical professionals, and NHS managers.

My project responsibilities included assembling a literature review of best practice evidence that focused on both clinical and management practices, to ensure that future proposals incorporated the most up to date national and international published evidence and guidelines. Having written review papers in the past, I was already familiar with Medline/Pubmed databases, however, I learned that resources such as the King’s Fund and BMJ Best Practice contained excellent publications on health policy and management, a topic that I found was not well referenced in many scientific databases.

In this particular case, the assembled document was applied to the case for change, and was discussed in detail at various client meetings. I found the exercise extremely helpful in learning how to identify and implement change within a structured organization.

Overall, I had a great experience, and I would recommend taking this unique opportunity to learn about medical consultancy, and management and gain transferable skills from an incredibly talented group of people at KPMG, regardless of whether you see your future career within the NHS or not.