Foreign medical students and Emergency Medicine electives?

[Free2Dream]

Hi guys,

I felt it was most appropriate to post this here in the physician/resident forum, but mods please feel free to move if it is better suited elsewhere.

I'm a third year medical student in Australia looking to move to the US (possibly permanently) to complete my residency in Emergency Medicine. My degree is 5 years and we are expected to complete an overseas elective between our 4th and 5th years (for me that will be January 2015).

Ideally I want to complete my elective in the emergency department of a hospital that I'd like to match at, however now that I've started getting in contact with prospective hospitals/universities, I've discovered a lot of them outright refuse to accept medical students from abroad in their emergency department (despite accepting them in IM and surgical electives). It's been really quite disheartening, mainly because I didn't expect such a response I suppose.

Is anyone able to offer insight as to why this may be the case? Is there a shortage of elective placements? Or are they concerned about foreign students not being up to par in their clinical abilities or spoken English? I could understand the latter could be an issue for some students, but us Aussies?

In addition, does anyone know if their emergency department accepts international students for electives?

Thanks so much, any responses are much appreciated.

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[BoardingDoc]

You will likely need to apply through VSAS. That's the Visiting Student Application Service. Most institutions in the US use this system to apply to away electives. There are a few exceptions where the institution will have their own custom application but these are generally the more selective hospitals e.g. Harvard. In fairness, I doubt that the more selective programs which aren't on VSAS will accept foreign applicants anyway.

Looking at VSAS now, there are several EM programs which take international students.

University of cincinnati
Wake forest
Florida hospital - orlando
Akron Childrens
University of new mexico
University of Rochester
Michigan State U
Maricopa integrated health
George washington U
SUNY downstate

I'd guess that there are more beyond that, but I don't know for sure. It is hard for international students to get into US programs though. I've done EM rotations at 3 different hospitals. At two of them there were international students, however, they were all observers and were not allowed to see patients in the role of an intern, so I don't really know that I'd call that an "elective" so much as "prolonged shadowing time."

EDIT: the two places that I worked at where there were international observers were NOT on the list I posted above. In other words, I'm guessing the list above actually will let you do an elective, and that hospitals not on the list might let you stand around and watch

 

[Free2Dream]

Thanks so much for your reply, BoardingDoc.

I had a look at VSAS, but the website states that international students are not eligible to apply through their system, however they provided a link for the EEC (Extramural Electives Compendium) which will hopefully give me something to work with.

Thanks for taking the time to lis the available options on VSAS: I was looking into SUNY downstate before, but they don't take students from abroad on EM electives and George Washington U only take students from a "limited number" of international schools (not mine). I will search the others too, to see if any are a possibility.

 

[dotcb]

I'd suggest contacting individual residency administrators at programs you're interested in.

http://www.saem.org/membership/services/residency-directory

Some will accept you, some won't. When I've seen this, the rotators have been "observers" and not the level of responsibility of medical students or subinterns. Not sure why, but it may have to do with legal reasons, or the significant differences in medical culture and practice between countries...

You understand you need to pass all the Step tests to do a US residency, right?

 

[gro2001]

If you are interested in the North East area I'd specifically recommend the following:

-New York Hospital Queens: I did this rotation as an FMG, so I know they must take them
-New York Presbyterian Hospital: one of the senior residents went to school in Australia, for whatever that's worth.
-Yale: as an exception among the Ivy League places (not that that's necessarily something you want in an EM program) they actually are fairly FMG friendly.