hi, i requested some info from Pat Park (
[email protected] you might want to contact her directly as some things might have changed since then) at the med board in cali on this same subject some time ago and she sent me this
Pat Park, Foreign Schools Liaison, Medical Board of California
California law requires all applicants to have completed 72 weeks of hands-on clinical clerkships during medical school in approved teaching hospitals. My understanding is that for Philippine students, our Board applies the fourth-year clerkships and the internship year clerkships toward the 72-week requirement. If a Philippine medical school student did not complete the internship year clerkships in one of the medical school's major affiliate teaching hospitals, he/she receives only 18 weeks of free elective credit for the internship year, and the student is usually deficient in the total 72 weeks of clinical training required in California law. I believe the deficiency is usually in elective (not core) clinical training, but I could be wrong.
If applicants with elective deficiencies apply to begin residency training programs in California, they will have the option of remedying their deficiencies in approved teaching hospitals prior to beginning residency training OR (if the residency training program that wishes to match them is willing) they may use the first couple of weeks of their residency training to remedy the number of weeks of their clinical elective deficiency. This does not work so simply if their deficiency is in a required core clerkship.
Important points:
- The remedial training and the residency training are not completed concurrently (i.e., "double counted"). If applicants match with a California residency program, they must remedy any undergraduate clinical training deficiencies BEFORE they begin the two years of residency training required for licensure in California.
- Applicants cannot begin any required remedial training until AFTER they have received written permission from this office. This is especially true if the remedial training will be completed in a California teaching hospital.
- If an applicant with elective training deficiencies applies for California licensure after having completed more than 2 years of residency training in another state, it's possible that their "excess" residency training will remedy their deficiency. Of course, this will NOT be true if the applicant is deficient in a particular core clinical area, and the residency training that they completed out-of-state was not in that particular core area. In this case, the applicant would need to remedy the core training deficiency before proceeding to licensure in California.
