I'm interested in HPSP or USUHS and joining the Navy to serve my country and patch some soldiers up. I have searched around but haven't found any current (closest I found was this thread started 6 years ago:
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=112867) information regarding if GMO tours were still standard practice.
Spending a few years as a GMO and delaying residency does not sound terribly exciting to me.
I recently spoke to a Navy Doc that specialized in tropical infections and she had said that it was unlikely to have to serve a GMO tour. Does anyone know anything contrary to this?
Thanks in advance.
If you are interested in a competitve specialty, meaning anything surgical (especially ortho), anaesthesia, and EM, you can count on doing GMO time. Too many of the applicants will have done a tour and will have higher accrued points in the selection process as a result. Even among returning GMOs, there is stiff competition for in-service slots, especially for gas and EM.
The GMO issue is still controversial, as it should be, but the Navy is and has been determined to ignore the Congress and its supposed insistence on eliminating post-internship GMOs in favor of BE/BC doctors. So far, they have gotten away with this and it has cost them nothing (except a steady decline in competitiveness of HPSP applicants, so not exactly
nothing.)
It is laughable to think the USMC is going to determine the Navy Medical Corps training policies. They could simply get told that this is the new pool of medical officers from which you will receive support. End message. Blaming it on the Marines is just too funny, no matter what the Marine battalion culture is. Do they cry about the dentists and chaplains too?
The Navy does not have enough training billets to offer residency training for all the allotments it has through the HPSP. The structure of its present training hospitals is highly pyramidal ("top hat") and is specifically designed to crank out lots of PGY1 doctors who must become GMOs simply because there aren't enough PGY2 slots to train them all. The present system requires large numbers to be flushed into the GMO pool from which most are expected to electively leave the service, and a few are expected to return to fill the much smaller number of PGY2 openings. This has nothing to do with Marines, except that is where large numbers of intern-GMOs are sent to wait. It would have to grant many more civilian deferments and then have to deal with a disaffected pool of BC/BE physicians who would cost more to field as they would be entitled to higher pay with greater rank and qualifications. They would also be possibly less compliant with the quality of leadership from BUMED which relies on undertrained GMOs who want only to get their opportunity to train properly, in or out of the service, to not rock the boat too much. It is one thing for an O3 to say the BUMED policies are archaic, reckless and dangerous, it is different when that comes from someone with more credibility, qualifications and professional standing.
