As oral health is the window to the overall health of a person, it’s crucial to provide appropriate dental care so that even the disadvantaged communities can keep their beautiful smile. While assisting professional dentists in cities or villages, your able to do hands-on tasks like extractions, filling or scaling. If you’re thinking about getting a job in dental care or if you study a similar subject already, volunteering might be the perfect chance to prove your qualification in this field of health services.

Even basic medical care is not accessible in many communities and clinics based in these areas are often short in supplies. Therefore, volunteers are needed in all facets of the healthcare field, at all levels. To increase resources, you can assist nurses in their daily tasks, raise the awareness for HIV or support rural hospitals, if you’re a medical student. Help to raise medical attention to children and families and support the on-site teams in bringing underprivileged areas to international medical standards.

When it comes to nurses, the global demand is quite high, especially in developing countries. If you are a nurse or if you already have special skills in fields of nursing, you should definitely take the chance to go abroad and make valuable learning experiences as well as expanding your knowledge in a special field. As a volunteer in health services with a focus on nursing, there are basically two major areas that you can contribute to: geriatric care and general nursing. Make a difference by sharing your knowledge with medical professionals from all over the world and contribute to the work on the ground by attending to the post-natal needs of expectant mothers or help the elderly to solve their challenges with old age.

Besides working in a hospital or clinic, volunteers are needed in communities and schools to train required environmental sanitation practices. Contribute to your medical learning progress by contributing to a better cause.

In many disadvantaged communities, an appropriate nutrition isn’t priority number one when it comes to general health care issues and tends to be not noticed in many cases. That this is an important cause indeed, is easy to prove based on the number of chronic heart diseases, diabetes or vitamin deficiencies. To make a difference, volunteers are needed to promote the importance of appropriate nutrition by educating children in schools, or help to seed sustainable foods like wheat or corn.

Even though there are still new HIV infections reported every year, the numbers have been constantly decreasing for the last few years. This improvement mainly developed due to many positive changes in the educational sector as well as a better access to affordable treatments. As a volunteer in health services, you can contribute to the on-going development by assisting the projects in assessing the prevailing knowledge of local communities to elaborate a suitable educational setting afterwards. Besides caring for a proper education, a further task of a volunteer is the mobilisation of locals to get tested. Help to conduct these tests and therefore, help to get the number of new infections closer to zero.

Due to the infrastructural situation, many communities in Africa or Asia are living in rural communities without proper access to technology, health services or education. Become a volunteer in health services and help to make a difference in rural communities. As many different projects are located in underprivileged areas, you’ll have a wide range of projects that you can participate in. Become a health supporter in Ghana or a maternal health promoter in the South Sudan – either way, your effort helps to maintain the development of rural communities in the health care sector.