Right after New Year, call the Volunteer Department of a hospital close to where you live during the academic year. Express an interest in doing any type of work that will give you the opportunity to have some contact with patients. This might mean coloring & playing board games with kids in the pediatric ward, pushing patients in wheelchairs from one location to another, transmitting messages from clinicians to the family waiting area. Can you teach a craft or play card games with pregnant women on bedrest? Sit with patients getting chemo or diaylisis so that they are not left alone? Take that time to talk to patients, hear their stories. Let any clinicians whom you meet know that you are pre-med. They may offer to let you watch as they do things that you wouldn't ordinarily see.
After you have 50 hours of volunteer time, ask if there is something more intense that you could do as a volunteer. Keep ramping up your duties as a volunteer. It is not glamourous. You are showing your ability to tolerate the servant role, the providing of care, that you can tolerate the discomfort, smell, aggravation, that is part of the hospital environment. It isn't about learning to read x-rays or seeing surgical procedures being performed (although that might be a by-product). It is about seeing the medical environment in a way that an anthropologist might visit a previously unknown culture in a remote corner of the world.
Figure on at least 2 semesters of volunteer work of this type. If you have a good experience and can work out a deal where you recruit & train other pre-meds at your school to the volunteer corps at the hospital then you manage to get yourself what the adcom considers a "leadership" role.
