Medicine:Accreditation process for international medical graduates

An international medical graduate is a physician who leaves the country where he or she completed the undergraduate and sometimes postgraduate studies in medicine and moves to another country either for higher postgraduate studies or for employment purposes.

Some countries like USA, UK and Canada have entry exams like USMLE or Professional and Linguistic Assessment Board test (PLAB) which allows the overseas graduates to gain local registration in order to practice medicine in these respective countries. Subsequently, once they obtain the local registration most of these doctors are allowed to continue their employment and training towards their respective specialties.

Australia and New Zealand have started to reorganise their regulation and accreditation process of the overseas doctors and are currently in the process of establishing a National registration board that regulates the registration process of all the doctors practicing medicine in Australia.

Some of these International Medical Graduates are fully qualified specialists from overseas. The overseas qualifications are only considered as partially equivalent in countries like Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia.

Specialist colleges

The overseas specialists especially the international medical graduates (IMG) will need to submit their overseas specialist qualifications for accreditation by the respective colleges in Australia or New Zealand before they commence their training in their interested field (specialty) of Medicine

Each specialty holds their specialist college e.g.: Royal College of Anaesthetists for anaesthesia and intensive care in the UK or College of Intensive Care Medicine for critical care Medicine in Australia or Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in Dublin.

Each college holds the peer group of the fully qualified specialists as its members as well as the executive committee. The training programmes for each specialty is designed by the respective colleges which also conducts the exit examination before the completion of training which allows the trainee doctor to be labelled as a specialist or a Fellow when he/she completes the specialist training

Accreditation process

These colleges are also actively involved in screening the overseas qualifications of specialist doctors who are International medical graduates. The accreditation committees comprise a group of senior doctors in each faculty or specialty. The senior doctors comprising the accreditation committee will verify the overseas qualifications and the curriculum vitae of the overseas specialists before submitting the final assessment report to the College.

The college training committee will subsequently design the course of further training for these doctors based on the outcome of the assessment report whether their qualifications from overseas are deemed to be partially comparable or incomparable.

In majority of situations these assessment reports are fair and justified. The accreditation process is based on well designed and strict guidelines. Most of the International Medical graduates will end up doing additional years of training in their interested specialty as advised by the college before becoming a full specialist in the new country.