How a trip to Europe led to a career

In 2016 Benjamin Fitzgerald took the gap year of a lifetime when he embarked on a journey across the globe and straight into a job that would lead him to his career path. Along with the experiences he gained within the job, he made memories that would last a lifetime, travelling around Europe helping his clients. I spoke to Benjamin about his travels.

Q: Why did you move to the UK?

A: I was approached by a medical assistance company after they found out I wanted to complete a degree in Paramedicine, so they offered me life experience with an internship in their medical assistance company.

Q: What did the job involve?

A: In the first six weeks with the company, I was an assistant international case manager, but after that six weeks I moved up to being an international case manager as well as a nursing repatriation specialist. This involved working in a command centre where I arranged treatment, transportation and coverage assistance for injured travellers to get back to their countries. My company was subcontracted by different insurance companies to arrange the medical assistance side of their travel insurance policies.

Q: What kind of training did you need to undertake to work in this job?

A: From my previous work in high needs care I already had the training required, which was a cert 3 in community services and development, first aid training, working with vulnerable people card, bowel care training, peg feed training, palliative care training and personal care training.

Q: Where did the job take you in terms of travel?

A: The job took me across Europe. I visited Spain, the French Alps, the Swiss alps, Italy and Tenerife. I would fly to these places to assist people who had been involved in accidents where their limbs had been broken or they had a stroke and needed medical assistance on their way back to the UK.

Q: What was the most memorable experience of the job?

A: My last day at work – it was a very stressful and difficult job to do, you often felt like you were getting nowhere some days. At the end of my time in the job, they gave me a mug with a nice card and everyone was so impressed with how well I had done in the job in the eight months I worked there. I felt a great sense of achievement and it was a great experience that I’ll never regret even though it was hard.

Q: What was the worst part of the job?

A: When clients died. Travel insurances are sneaky with death; often, they have a 5000-pound max coverage. A lot of the time the insurance doesn’t cover the most part of their death. It’s a very difficult and emotional time. We can’t help them until we have checked all the documents and medical histories of people along with their consent forms. We aren’t the insurance company, but we are who the clients are speaking to directly and it can be a difficult thing to handle.

Q: What would you say to anyone thinking of going to the UK to do the same job?

A: Just do it, the life skills and maturity that you get out of the experience is invaluable. It made me mature so much and things really came into perspective for me as my social skills grew immensely. I wasn’t sure if I was on the right track with not going to university straight away but I feel like now after this experience, I feel a lot better about the decisions I made over the last few years and I have done a fair bit with my life for a 21-year-old.