Foreign born doctors increase in US, but path to practice difficult

Carol Forsloff - "I was looking around for a good doctor, but when I checked the local hospital there seemed to be a lot of foreign ones.  Are they are as good?"  Research reveals they are.

A clerk at Wal-Mart in Natchitoches, Louisiana once expressed the concerns many people have about foreign-born doctors.  That's especially true when the local hospital has a number of foreign-born doctors on staff.  While these may be hospital resident doctors still involved in developing skills, research shows these folks to be on par with other doctors when it comes to patient care.


What's been discovered, however, is despite the fact medical schools in the United States are considered to be the best in the world, there are good doctors from international medical schools as well.

This takes away the notion that doctors trained outside the United States are not as good.  A recent study in the journal Health Affairs seems to contradict this assumption.

According to the American Medical Association,graduates of international medical schools have been an important part of the medical community in the United States, as well as other parts of the world, since the 1940s. Today, of the roughly 950,000 doctors practicing in the U.S., there are over 240,000 of them that have been foreign-trained.

The Health Affairs study found that patients treated by foreign-born doctors who were educated in countries outside the U.S. give treatment to patients on par with American-born, American-educated doctors.

Doctors born in the U.S. who trained at an international medical school and returned home to practice, however, did not do as well. The study found that those doctors ranked last in terms of quality of care.

The study reviewed over 244,000 cases in Pennsylvania, with patients suffering from heart attacks or congestive heart failure, to determine the quality of doctor care. The report looked at level of care by length of hospital stay and mortality rates.

According to the AMA statistics, graduates of international medical schools make up 25 percent of practicing physicians in the United States. Nearly 20 percent of those international graduates are American citizens who have chosen to go abroad to medical school for one reason
or another.

Though doctors born and trained in other countries must pass the same tests and undergo the same residency requirements to be licensed in the United States, they have long faced a reputation of not being as competent as other doctors.

Dr. John J. Norcini, first author of the Health Affairs study and president of the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research, tells us "this assumption was initially based on lower training exam scores. But by the mid-1990s, he notes,foreign-born doctors were outperforming their peers on these tests."

Many studies have reported the United States will be facing a shortage of doctors, that will be worsening in coming decades even as the population of seniors is increasing. A recent report by The Wall Street Journal notes that in the U.S. there is expected to be a shortfall of over 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years.

Experts say this is one reason that international medical school graduates are so important to our health care system.  They will figure in closing the gaps where American educated doctors cannot.

This type of information is also helpful for attorneys to understand in looking at medical malpractice, since the aim of bad medical work should fall equally on both American and foreign-born without bias, which seems to be the substantiation in the presentation of an article with this information.

In other words, in towns like Natchitoches, Louisiana, small and mostly rural where doctors often are in short supply, foreign-born doctors may increase in availability.  The same is true in Hawaii where there are many foreign-born doctors in medical groups like Kaiser.

But the path for a foreign-born doctor to become a physician in the United States is not easy.  Many doctors who were trained in other countries and who have worked as doctors find themselves working at menial jobs when they come to the United States.  So a program called Welcome Back was created in order to allow foreign born doctors a path to practicing medicine in the United States.

Studies show that shouldn't worry local citizens, since their patient care has been found just as good.