What exactly counts as clinical or medical experience? I think someone wrote on a post that if you got close enough to smell a patient it counts. What about teaching for the red cross, which is not working with patients, but sort of preventive medicine? Or how about extensive shadowing that involves staring at patients a lot.
Well, there are two kinds of such experiences schools might ask about: your clinical experiences and healthcare/medically-related experiences.
For something to count as a clinical experience, I think, you would really need to have had direct contact with patients. For example, working as an EMT-B, a CNA, phlebotomist, hospital transporter, hospital technican, or mental health counselor/coach, would place you in direct contact with patients; these types of work are clearly clinical. Yeah, shadowing a healthcare professional would technically be clinical, since you do have direct contact with patients, but it is probably not as strong as clinical experiences where you directly interact with patients. However, since it is not that common for college students to have the opportunity to interact directly with patients without some kind of basic healthcare certification, shadowing is generally considered.
For an experience to be healthcare-related, it need only be associated with the realm of the prevention and treatment of illness and injury, whether mental or physical. Obviously, these types of work can take on many forms. In other words, I think your work with the Red Cross (I'm thinking you are teaching CPR, BLS, First Aid, etc.) would count as medically-related, but it wouldn't think it counts as clinical experience.
