Your future

Medical care
Once you begin working as a ‘non-specialised starting physician’ in the healthcare system, you'll often start out as a resident physician for a number of years, meaning you are training as a specialist in your chosen field. Your residency lasts between two and a half to six years, depending on the speciality. Once your training is finished and you are a specialist, you are fully responsible for the patient care you administer, typically in a hospital or a clinic. But you can also find work without becoming a specialist. If you work in an academic hospital, you work as an employee of the hospital. In a general (or district) hospital, you form a partnership with your colleagues and are actually an entrepreneur within the hospital.If you go for the two and a half-year specialisation in tropical medicine, you can choose to work for organisations such as Doctors Without Borders.  

University or (international) research institute
Once you have finished a master's in Medicine, you can also start working as a scientific researcher. Researchers try to answer important questions that can improve patients’ lives. Scientists share and publish their results in scientific journals, but they also try to translate their results into concrete solutions for society, especially in the medical field. If you are a motivated and curious medical specialist you can also set up your own study, through which you might be able to obtain a PhD.