Tracking clinical hours so applications write themselves
The week an application opens is the wrong time to reconstruct two years of volunteering from a calendar and a memory. Applicants who log as they go submit hour totals they can defend and descriptions with specifics in them. Applicants who do not end up guessing, rounding up, and writing "various tasks". This is the minimum logging habit that avoids that, and it works for OMSAS, AMCAS, AACOMAS and CASPA.
What to record, per session
One row per shift or session, filled in the same day. The fields that pay off later are:
- Date and hours. Actual hours, not scheduled. If you left early, log the shorter number.
- Activity and setting. The organisation, the unit or clinic, and whether it was clinical, research, service, employment or shadowing. Keep the categories aligned with the application you will use; AMCAS has its own list of experience types and CASPA distinguishes patient-care experience from healthcare experience.
- Supervisor or contact for that session, with an email. The person who signs off on hours in month one may have moved on by application time; you want every name.
- What you did, in one line, at the task level: "fed two patients, restocked linen, sat with a confused patient while nursing was at handover". These lines become the numbers and verbs in your descriptions.
- What you saw or thought, in one or two lines, only when something happened. This is the raw material for a Most Meaningful paragraph or an interview answer, and it is impossible to recover later.
That is five minutes per session. A spreadsheet is the right tool because it will sum, filter and count characters; a notes app will not.
What to keep per activity
Separately from the log, keep one record per activity: start and end dates, whether it is ongoing, the primary verifier's name, title, email and phone, whether they have agreed to be listed, and a running draft description in each format you will need. For a Canadian applicant considering US schools that is a 150-character OMSAS line and a 700-character AMCAS paragraph; for a pre-PA applicant it is a 600-character CASPA entry and a patient-care versus healthcare classification.
Hours: how the applications ask for them
OMSAS asks for dates and lets the description carry the load, so hours appear in your line as a number you choose to state. AMCAS asks for total hours per entry and per date range. CASPA and AACOMAS ask for hours and, in CASPA's case, sort them into categories that schools set minimums against. In all cases the number you give should be a sum from your log. Round down to the nearest ten if the sum is not exact; nobody has ever been rejected for claiming 190 hours instead of 200, and the reverse can happen.
Verifiers before you need them
Ask each verifier, in writing, at least a month before you list them. Tell them which activity, what dates, what hour total, and what you wrote. Ask them to reply confirming. Keep the reply. If they want changes, make them. This one email converts a hopeful listing into a verified one, and it is the single most common thing applicants leave until the last week. Templates are in the verifier article.
Canada versus the US
The Canadian sketch cares about breadth across categories, verifiability and, at Ottawa and Queen's, which three entries you flag as most important. It does not set hour minimums. US MD applications do not set official minimums either, but a persistent expectation of sustained clinical exposure exists, and AMCAS's per-entry hour field makes thin entries visible. Pre-PA applicants face explicit patient-care hour thresholds at many programs. The log serves all three; only the outputs differ.
Shadowing, in the log
Log shadowing separately from clinical volunteering and never merge them. They are different experience types in every application, and relabelling observation as patient care is the one logging error that can end an application. In Canada, shadowing is also a low-yield entry relative to sustained roles; the log will make that visible to you by showing where the hours actually went.
Starting late
If you have two years of activity and no log, do a one-time reconstruction: schedules, emails, shift confirmations, calendar entries, and your supervisor's records. Enter a conservative total as a single "historical hours" figure for each activity, then log properly from today. Be honest with yourself about the number; the verifier will be asked to confirm it.
This article describes published rules as understood on 2026-09-06. Rules change each cycle; the linked official pages are the authority. Not affiliated with OUAC, the AAMC or any school.