Anesthesiology Fellowships for an FMG

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Sheepo

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Dear all,

I am an anesthesiology resident in Australia, and am considering a overseas cardiothoracic fellowship in the US. I am looking for experiences, or those who have heard of others' experiences, of such fellowships or their respective departments. What I am looking for in a fellowship: hands-on experience so I can deal with most situations, TEE experience (and certification), supportive (eg provide non-clinical time for) of research.

Places of interest are as follows (but very happy to hear about any others you have): BID, Mass Gen, Brigham, John Hopkins, Duke, THI, Mayo Rochester, Cleveland, UCSD, UCSF, UCLA, Vanderbilt. Culture, unique/special caseload, on-call hours, level of supervision would all be helpful information.

It's great that such a broad, yet specialised community like SDN exists. Thanks for reading and hopefully I get a few responses!

Kind regards from Down Under

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I don't think you'll be able to qualify for any cardiac anesthesia fellowship without having graduated an American residency program. Maybe a non-ACGME accredited one, but I simply doubt you can even get a training license without having passed the USMLE.

On top of the legal issues, these are extremely competitive programs even for American grads.

And why would you even consider an American fellowship? Count yourself as lucky for practicing in Australia.

Good luck.
 
I trained at one of these institutions and we definitely had fellows (all in ACGME accredited programs) with overseas anesthesia training. The ones I know personally were foreign nationals who trained in their home country (medical school and residency), came here for fellowship, and went back to their country to practice. We had CV fellows from Canada and multiple CCM fellows from Singapore. None of them had any US training. I don't know the specifics of their license situation, but I would be very surprised if they had taken the USMLE.

Additionally, a number of my attendings did their med school and anesthesia training in their home country (particularly the UK, Ireland, Canada and South Africa) and only did fellowship in the US prior to coming on staff. Granted, I believe there used to be licensing loophole (like in the 80's-early 90's) where foreign trained physicians could do this with their license limited to practicing at their sponsoring institution.
 
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You 100% do not need any us training or USMLE to apply for some us fellowships. I'm not sure how many but there are a fraction that non us can apply for...
 
for a more authoritative look at this topic:

http://www.acgme.org/Portals/0/PDFs...iology/041_adult_cardiothoracic_anes_elig.pdf

Basically, there is a requirement to complete an ACGME (or its Canadian equivalent) residency program, but there is a waiver for this for exceptional candidates (specifics are outlined in the link). It does appear that one has to pass USMLE 1-3. Also there is something called an ACGME-International accredited residency which, if completed, apparently counts for something. I did a bit of googling, but couldn't find a list of ACGME-I approved programs. The website does specifically reference Singapore as the first region to adopt ACGME-I accreditation, so maybe that's why we had fellows from Singapore.
 
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