A range of respiratory problems greeted the six students from the University of Wollongong's Health Over Wealth collective when they arrived on Vanuatu's Tanna Island.

Most of the island's children and many adults had a cough or worse due to output from the island's Mt Yasur volcano, group advocacy officer Aubrey Litvack said.

"There's still the occasional small eruption that sends ash into the air and then disperses it," he said.

"It's constantly in people's eyes and hair. Most, if not all of us came back with a bit of a cough."

The students from UOW's Graduate School of Medicine took donated supplies from the Illawarra to bolster the island's paltry medical resources.

Over two weeks they assisted in mass vaccinations for schoolchildren, pre and post-natal care and education sessions for workers.

Lifestyles were semi-traditional on the island, where homes were huts, electricity was scarce, bush medicine was still the norm and the language was mostly a dialect of pidgin English.

A medical outpost was being run by an untrained islander who was dispensing courses of antibiotics too small to have any effect.

A lone hospital - served by a single Canadian doctor on permanent six-monthly rotation - housed only "archaic" technology.

A grateful woman named her baby after one of the group - Ewan Stewart - after he assisted with her baby's post-natal care.

For Mr Litvack, who hopes to work for the medical aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres, the gratitude was eye-opening.

"The medicine we're learning is not available to everyone," he said. "It's incredibly rewarding to have even small skills appreciated that much.

"It also makes sure you recognise the root of medicine, which is being able to communicate with people and to listen - even if you don't speak the same language."

The group, which also included Benny Hill, Rhys Harding, Caydee Pollock and Hailey Lawrey, returned on July 12 and has since established the Tanna Island Hospital Relief project to raise funds and provide supplies.