Originally Posted by AmericanIMG

so any news on this????

Originally Posted by azskeptic

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/met...dstudents.html

International med students in a bind
Hospital ends placement deal

By TERESA BORDEN, ANDY MILLER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/28/05
Christopher Smith didn't mind the grueling hospital hours, high debt load and whirlwind life of a medical student.

The Emory University grad from Rome was willing to put up with the stigma of choosing a Caribbean medical school rather than languish for years on a waiting list for a U.S. school. He figured the chance to become a physician — healing patients as a surgeon or in emergency medicine — was worth it all.

BEN GRAY / Staff
Christopher Smith, who attends a Caribbean medical school, is among those whose medical training will be disrupted. Christopher Smith, who attends a Caribbean medical school, is among those whose medical training will be disrupted.





Now he and about 180 other students from international medical schools, finishing their education at Atlanta Medical Center, find their careers in chaos.

They've been told they can't finish their training there, the result of a contract dispute between the company that set up the training, Graduate Medical Consultants Group, and the hospital and its for-profit parent company, Tenet Healthcare.

GMC, which finds U.S. hospital slots for foreign medical school students, said it's stunned by the sudden cutoff of the Atlanta Medical deal. But Tenet said the hospital was not aware of corporate guidelines barring such med students from training programs — a standard that the company said ensures patient safety and privacy.

Once the arrangement became known to corporate officials, the company said, the contract was severed. The students expect their training at Atlanta Medical to be terminated in December.

The dustup has its roots in the looming national shortage of physicians, which already has surfaced in certain regions and specialties. Triggered partly by the aging of the population, the doctor deficit has pushed medical schools, both here and overseas, to ramp up their capacity.

Building boom overseas

While U.S. medical schools have expanded a little after years of stagnant growth, a building boom among international medical schools has occurred, partly to accommodate students who can't get into American schools.

Since 2000, at least 20 schools have popped up in the Caribbean, as struggling countries look for investment money and students — many of them Americans — look for an available training ground to becoming an M.D. The students also battle a stigma of attending what some in the medical establishment consider second-rate schools.

Still, international medical institutions, in dozens of countries, have supplied a regular crop of doctors here for years. Twenty-three percent of practicing U.S. physicians have graduated from foreign med schools, up from 20.9 percent in 1980. In Georgia, 22 percent of graduating medical residents attended foreign schools, a recent survey found.

Dr. Cecil *******, president of Graduate Medical Consultants, says international medical students who do their clinical work at U.S. hospitals, like homegrown students, have to pass a two-step medical licensing exam before they graduate from medical school. He says it effectively weeds out unqualified people.

Series of clerkships

GMC hooked up Smith and other students from Caribbean schools with Atlanta Medical Center, a 460-bed downtown Atlanta hospital, for their last two years of medical school. They run through a series of clinical clerkships lasting six to 12 weeks. The students do real medical work and see real patients, doing physical exams and other tasks under the close supervision of attending physicians.

After two years of clerkships, and having passed the two-step exam, the student earns a medical degree, then heads into a residency program and, later, after passing a third exam, applies for a license to practice.

GMC said it serves students in several ways: setting up the clerkships in hospitals, providing lectures, maintaining records for licensure, assisting them with residency applications. Smith, whose wife is also a medical student, says signing up with GMC stopped the couple's endless jumping from city to city and hospital to hospital to complete course work. Atlanta Medical became their home.

*******, the company's president, said overseas schools are eager to get their students into U.S. clinical studies programs, and generally don't have teaching hospitals where the students can do clerkships.

GMC's business has blossomed. ******* said that at one point, GMC agreed to pay Atlanta Medical Center $250,000 per year to allow his students into its hallways.

The company could afford it. A profit-and-loss statement shows GMC received $1.6 million in tuition and fees from 10 to 12 overseas medical schools from January to June. Some students also pay GMC. The company, in turn, pays physicians a fee to supervise students.

It's a business model ******* wants to replicate across the country. "I make no apologies for being a profitable company," he said.

While GMC said it has funneled students into Atlanta Medical for about four years, competitor companies have also sent others from overseas schools into the hospital.

The contract conflict, in fact, erupted earlier this year when the hospital became concerned that too many international medical students, some from the recently closed Southwest Hospital and Medical Center, were working there without enough oversight.

"We wanted to get a handle on who was supervising these students," said William Moore, chief executive at Atlanta Medical Center.

So the hospital signed a contract with GMC in April to oversee the international medical students. The deal gave GMC exclusive rights to run the student program.

But that provision triggered legal challenges from competitors. Within days, Atlanta Medical terminated the deal.

Tenet says the Atlanta hospital, by working with the international medical school students, was not adhering to corporate guidelines. Hospitals should take students only from accredited schools in the United States and Canada, said Tenet spokesman Steve Campanini. "We believe it provides the safest standard for our patients,'' ensuring the quality of students' education, he said.

But he also acknowledged that Atlanta Medical, which Tenet has owned since 1997, had no patient safety problem.

Tenet's med student guidelines are not written, Campanini said, and it wasn't until the GMC dispute surfaced that Tenet knew of the Atlanta Medical situation. Yet GMC said its students have been training at the Atlanta hospital for about four years.

Meanwhile, the Dallas-based company, with 74 hospitals nationally, says it's making its guidelines better known among its facilities.

*******, GMC's president, said he believes his students will be allowed to remain at Atlanta Medical until the end of the year.

Meanwhile, the students are wondering how to complete their final course work and stay on track to become doctors.

"He can't sleep," said Clara Roman, Christopher Smith's wife. Like her husband, Roman is a medical student at St. Matthew's University School of Medicine in the Cayman Islands and is training at Atlanta Medical.

"We tend to not discuss what's going on around the dinner table because we each develop this knot in our stomach, and we walk away from the table because we cannot eat," Roman said. "We've lost our appetite."

Facing a deadline

Along with the other students, they are scrambling to find hospitals anywhere in the country that will let them finish the last four months of their clinical work before next May. By that time, students at U.S. and foreign schools are matched with hospitals here for residencies that are among the last steps before they can practice.

If they don't finish their course work in the spring, they may face a delay of a year for the next residency match. Smith says any long delay would force him to begin paying off school loans totaling about $150,000, but without the income from a residency. The payment would be about $1,000 a month for each of them, he says. A delay also means skills suffer, he says.

"We're terrified,'' Clara Roman said.

Originally Posted by ULTRON

Has this problem been solved?