I have noticed a lower quality among certain IMG residents. (Remember I am an IMG, I'm not trying to make a prejudiced statement).
Which ones? Ones who have had clinical training solely in England.
That's not to attack England nor these residents. In the UK, medschool starts at 18, and as a result, teachers do not press the students as hard as they do American students. UK students know less than American students in their respective years of training.
However the UK programs compensate for this because their residency (in their country known as House Officer) & attending system is different from ours. Once they finish residency, they are still considered to be in training, in a rank called a Registrar. A Registrar is something like a fellow in the US. Its not quite as high as an attending. Then after several years as a registrar-they become a Consultant--which is more on par with an attending.
OK so getting back to the original point why does this make some IMGs worse? Several foreign medschools in the carribean solely train their medstudents in the UK during their 3rd & 4th years, and these medstudents are expected to know less, do less work & are tested less then their American counterparts.
Well its ok in the UK to do that because as I said--their system is different and they do more years of training later on even after residency. The problem happens when you got a carribean medstudent put in the UK--who is going to the US to be a resident.
This resident now in turn did not get the level of training they would've gotten in the US.
How bad is it? I've seen some IMGs who've never done 1 H&P. I myself probably did somewhere around a few hundred in my 3rd & 4th years of medschool. I've seen several IMGs who fit the above description who've only done a small handful of physical exams, while I did a few hundred as a medstudent.
Now not every foreign carribean school follows the above trend. St. George's for example--most of their students solely do US rotations. They do offer UK rotations but advise medstudents to only to a minimum amount in the UK. SGU students are on par with US students in terms of board exams scores and clinical training. I also heard Ross has several US rotations available.
I know this may offend some people, but I do not mean to attack IMGs from schools that do rotations solely in the UK. I sympathize. Most of the guys I know from these schools are good guys. Further--I know several residents from the above programs that were undertrained, but were able to catch up. But this does not change the fact that several of them haven't done several of the hands on things you need to do that occur in the US, and it doesn't change the fact that unfortunately several residents I have seen were not able to catch up.
IMGs unfortunately do often get a worse choice of picks. Residency programs are given less money per resident when they pick up IMGs, and more money when they get graduates of American medschools. So the higher up residencies almost exclusively pick US students only. However there are plenty of good programs that are willing to be above this level of prejudice/oligarchy-what have you.
As I mentioned in the other IMG thread concerning psychiatry...I've only seen IMGs have a problem getting in when their first language was not English. In fact I talked to several of them and they told me the language issue was one of the first issues brought up during the interview. I was even told my several programs that they do not want people who speak English as a 2nd language.
Again, I am an IMG. I had no problem getting into a program. I still had a good list of programs that accepted me. However the top programs--well it will be harder to get into them, but all the lower tier to the above average programs, you'll have just as much of a chance.
