GMO and Out Questions

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MilHemeOnc

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Hey all,

I'm a current Navy HPSP medical student (4 year) who's interested in Internal Medicine mainly and possibly Emergency Medicine. I really want to do a flight surgery GMO tour, but know that this is minimum 2.5-3 years which if I understand correctly would put me at 1 year left. So since this would make me have to add service commitment if I did the other 2 years of my residency after the flight surgery tour.

After reading the other thread on doing GMO and out, I understand the different types of programs mostly on ERAS. But since there aren't to my understanding physician/advanced programs for IM/EM, how hard would it be to find a pgy2 spot in IM? Would I have to redo internship year?

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EM now requires the time between internship and PGY2 to be 36 months or less. So you would not be able to go into a civilian PGY2 EM year after your Navy obligation. You could go and start from internship at a 3 year program and still finish in the same time as if you went back to a Navy one as the Navy EM programs are 4 years in total anyway.

For IM, it really doesn’t extend you that much. You do your FS training, do a tour as a FS, go back for two more years of IM and then you just do your first job as an IM doc in the Navy. It adds only a couple of years, but you’ll be paid more during residency and be board certified by the time you leave the Navy. I have a friend who did this: internship, 2 year GMO, 2 more for residency and then a 2 year staff tour to get out board certified. He says he felt the higher pay in residency and leaving board certified was worth the extra 2 years, but that will be an individual decision.

I can’t help with how to find a civilian PGY2 IM spot, but I’m sure they are out there.
 
Thank you so much for your response! If I'm correct, bringing a family would extend my flight surgeon tour to a minimum of 3 years right? So then I would be pretty much done with my service commitment after FS training and the tour, but going for a 2 year residency would bring my service commitment back up to 2 years right?
 
There are essentially 3 different tour lengths for Navy flight surgery. There are 1 year unaccompanied tours, 2 year tours and 3 year tours. The 2 and 3 year tours don't matter if you bring your family or not, they are more based on if they are with an operational unit (2 years) or a training unit (3 years).

Regardless, you are going to burn about a year just for the flight surgeon training. When you finish any of those tours you will have either 2, 1, or 0 years left on your obligation. Going back to PGY2 IM would incur a 2 year obligation at the completion of IM. However that obligation runs concurrent with your remaining HPSP obligation.

The net effect is that you still only owe two years after you would finish residency. Your total length of time in the Navy would depend more on how long of a flight surgeon tour you did. But skip the one year if you want a real experience as a flight surgeon. Those one year tours are more clinic based in locations that have transient aviators or people on staff duty so you aren't with an actual squadron.
 
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