Navigating Healthcare as an exchange/mobility/foreign student

Visiting the Doctor

Head to Google Maps and look for Doctors' Clinics in your area. Then, either call or go to their website to find out what languages are serviced. Big cities will often have multilingual doctors. However, their level of language proficiency may not be sufficient for complicated discussions related to diagnosis, treatment, and medication. This might impact the quality of your healthcare!

Insist medications & conditions are written down by the doctor. Language barriers can make it difficult to follow what is being diagnosed!

Check out Google Reviews to avoid uncompassionate and unhelpful doctors. This will avoid you have to make repeat visits ($$$) at different clinics to get good medical care.

Consider coming with an advocate (a trusted friend) if you are consulting about a sensitive topic, like mental health care or sexual health. If you are stressed or anxious, it can be difficult to "stick to your guns" about what you need and properly engage in co-creating your own healthcare plan.

Cost

Depending on your insurer, you may need to pre-pay medical costs and then claim them back. This obviously creates financial stress as you have to pay up-front and then wait to be reimbursed (which can take weeks or months).

Another thing to keep in mind is that the cost of almost everything will be different to what you're used to in your Home Country. Costs of hospital stays, medicine, GP consultations, and more can be orders of magnitude different. A lot of student insurers won't cover medicine anyway.

In countries with socialised healthcare, where locals typically do not pay for treatment, it may be difficult to get estimates of costs from healthcare providers in advance. When I got a concussion in Austria, I tried to get an estimate of the cost of scans & a hospital consultations from the doctor, who insisted that even foreign visitors do not pay for emergency treatment. I took this with a pinch of salt and, as expected, got billed from the hospital a few weeks later and had to claim it back on my insurer. The amount was several hundred dollars - which is on the cheaper end of hospital costs. In some countries, it could be thousands or more. (If this is the case, call the hospital and your insurer to discuss a payment plan or approach).

My advice would be:

if you are able, keep a pot of money for advance payments of things like GPs visits
if getting prescribed medication, ask your GP about the cost upfront. For things like the contraceptive pill, there is a massive price range for equivalent medications!
check if your uni has a student health clinic for free or reduced cost treatment
inform every healthcare provider and member of the administration team of your situation. Remind them "I am a foreign student with limited student insurance. Please keep this in mind during billing and treatment so I can avoid unexpected costs."
attempt to get a cost estimate, in writing if possible. This way if it ends up being exorbitant you may have some leveraging power to negotiate directly with the provider.
ask for receipts, documents, and doctor's orders as much as possible. When the emergency doctor gave me the all-clear for my concussion, I asked her to write me an official note describing the injury I had, the tests she had performed, the results of those tests, and why those tests were warranted given the injury. This was to prevent the insurer coming back to me and claiming a particular test was "unnecessary" and therefore not covered. It was also to provide an official document to back up the circumstances surrounding the concussion.

Medication

Before departing, get your usual doctor or a doctor in your Home Country to write a brief summary of your medical and health history, and healthcare plan. Unfortunately, not all doctors will listen to their patients, and having this document may help you advocate for your healthcare plan.

For example, in Berlin I tried to get more beta-blockers prescribed, which I take off-label for my anxiety (based on medical consultation, of course). The doctor did not ask me to elaborate on my mental health history and told me he didn't want to prescribe them for me and that I needed to learn the difference between anxiety and stress. This put me in a very vulnerable position. I was an isolated student during COVID times, with a history of mental illness, who had found a medication with low side effects that had improved my (diagnosed) anxiety condition by 80%, only to be now threatened with being 'cut-off' without notice. In hindsight, I wish I had got my Munich doctor, who recommended the tablets for me during an extensive consultation, to write a note so I could advocate for myself better.

Always carry packaging and, if possible, prescription details when travelling. This is to avoid any issues at border security.

Check the medicines you are taking are legal in the destinations you are travelling too! You may be surprised to find that some medications are banned in some nations.

The other side of the coin here is that your regular medications may not be prescribed in your destination country. So you will either need to carry a full supply from home (may run into border problems), or consider alternatives. There will also be regional differences in which medications are preferentially prescribed. For example, in New Zealand metoprolol makes up 75% of all beta blocker prescriptions. In neighbouring Australia, it's only 5%.

Make sure to carry enough medication for your journey plus 1/2 weeks extra in case your checked baggage goes missing.

Differences in Standards of Care

During my studies, I have lived in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Canada, and Australia. These are all similarly developed Western countries, so I would not have expected differences in standards of care.

Some rather jarring experiences for me were:

not being introduced to or asked consent to be examined by a student (to this day I don't know if she was actually a medical student or just the doctor's teenage daughter...) (Germany)
not being given privacy to undress before examination (Germany)
having my sensitive medical results communicated to the school receptionist, who then told me as we passed in the hall... (Denmark)
peers asking "why did you go to the doctor" after a medical visit (in Denmark, it is a sign that you care for a person to ask about their visit, whereas in Australia, this is considered private and shouldn't be asked about).

Mental Health

If you have a regular therapist in your Home Country, let them know of your travel intentions well in advance so you can make a plan. Also, enquire whether Telehealth (email/phone/zoom) is something they offer. When I went overseas during COVID, I was in a position to continue seeing my regular therapist via Zoom (thought I had to pay out of pocket as I was no longer covered under Australian Medicare).

When you are feeling well (e.g. well before departure), familiarise yourself with emergency hotlines that offer support in your language at your destination city. These might be national crisis lines, university hotlines, or other organisations' hotlines. You don't want to be scrambling to find someone to call in a crisis.

Check out what your University offers in terms of student support. This might include things like workshops on managing stress, student counsellors, career counsellors, crisis hotlines, pastoral support, and more. At Uppsala University, I had good experiences seeing a chaplain on "walk and talks" - despite their religious affiliation, the support she offered was entirely non-religious.

I have also heard about "Befrienders Worldwide" who offer emergency support worldwide in a variety of languages.

I would be cautious of companies likes US-based Better Help, because it is unclear whether their therapists are allowed to be providing services outside of their licensed state.