orphaned resident being threatened by program

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hotcoco

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Hi everyone. I am an IM resident at a dumpster fire program. let’s say we had a lot of corruption and misappropriate of funds to the point where they were taking away our acgme fund and spending them on their personal expenses. we never got re-imbursed for anything, had terrible working conditions, did not have clean drinking water, the hospital never got cleaned, our clinic was with nurse practitioners and a bunch of our rotations were flat out never set up properly.

god almighty listened and acgme just shut the program down. it will be effectively closing down from july. I have secured a spot at an excellent program who is interested in taking me asap. my program director however does not want me to leave before the year ends because we will be a resident short.

can someone advise me on this: can the pd from the new accepting program ask acgme to transfer my acgme fund to them now or are they obligated to wait until the end of the academic year? there is a rule called the CMS DISPLACED RESIDENT RULE that allows an accepting program to ask for transfer of resident funding asap. i am trying to separate fact from fiction and understand what my rights are. ideally i would like to leave ASAP.
 
The funding has nothing to do with the ACGME. Funding comes from Medicare.

Your current program must release/transfer the funds to the new program. If they refuse to do so, I am not certain there is anything you or your new program can do.
 
It will take longer to fix this legally than it will to just stay where you are and complete your sentence. FWIW the new program doesn't have to have funding to take you, depending on the size of the program this actually might not matter much so make sure they actually care. A bigger problem is if you leave before your current contract is up and the feeling isn't mutual you could be held liable for whatever the breach penalty in you contract says, which has nothing to do with ACGME or medicare and is governed by your state contract laws. Just stick it out and move on next year to the new program.
 
Look - so in the grand scheme of things here, things could have gone much worse. You’re coming out of a failing program and starting at a good program in 6 months. You’re landing on your feet. Yes, it would be great if you could start there now, but the most important thing is that you have a solid program where you can finish your training. And you have that. Probably the best thing here is to put your head down, grind out the last 6 months, and be able to move on without a hitch.
 
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