The long answer is–it’s complicated and medical licensing regulations vary a great deal by country.
If a US medical grad wants to practice in another country, they must go through a credentialing process with that other country’s national medical licensing board.
Some countries will accept as US medical license as evidence of medical training equivalent to that offered in their own country and grant a US physician a full or provisional medical license; others won’t.
One doesn’t necessarily need to have a valid medical license in a particular country to do a fellowship there. (Fellows are working “under supervision” and receive temporary training licenses.)
Canada only recognizes medical licenses from the US and 3 Commonwealth countries (UK, Australia, South Africa) as being equivalent to a Canadian medical license. Even physicians who hold medical licenses in those countries still need to apply for credentialing and be approved by the Medical Council of Canada (MCC) before their Canadian medical license will be granted.
Canada requires medical grads of programs in other countries to sit for and pass their national licensing exam series (MCCEE and MCCQE), pass several language proficiency exams, have their residency/fellowship training evaluated & approved by the Canadian board for their specialty. This process takes at least one full year and can take as long as 5-6 years.
In D1’s case, she already holds a US medical license and she’s eligible for a provisional medical license in her new country. (It’ll become a full license once she passes her specialty boards in her new country.) She will be able to practice medicine in both countries. Her fellowship doesn’t have an exact equivalent in the US, but she can petition a US sub-specialty board to allow her to use her foreign training to fulfill, or partially fulfill, the requirements for sub-specialty certification.
But her hospital really did sent out a memo promising FREE STARBUCKS COFFEE to any member of the medical staff willing to brave the blizzard to come into work today.
Residency programs get Match results almost a week sooner than applicants do. Med schools get results (or at least a list of those who didn’t Match) the Monday before the students get their results.
And remember that some Match applicants are applying for multiple matches–a PGY1 transitional or preliminary program plus an advanced program for PGY2.
All these have their timelines. It is like national merit people know how to make the cut off the moment they get the scores but wait until September to make it official (a whole 8-9 months?).
Very little of the stuff other than validating people’s credentials seems to be manual. As an IT guy, I think they are listing a lot of computer tasks and claiming it takes time.
^^ The algorithm is really not that hard, once you have the data sorted out and verified, a simple BASIC program running on a 1980’s PC can handle it within 12 hours. On today’s super computer it will be completed in seconds.
FMGs and USIMGs are validated before they enter the Match. The ECFMG checks their credential and given them a registration token–just like every US med schools gives their own students registration tokens for ERAS/NRMP.
However, the NRMP has to do a brief revalidation to makes sure every student participating in Match is still eligible to be in the Match.( i.e. that each registrant is still in good standing with their med school and will graduate in spring 2019.)
Wowm
Why 43000 total applicants only 35000ish submitted rol’s? What happen to those 8000 apps? are those img/fmgs? Already matched in Aoa? I thought nrmp match rate is much higher. Do they calculate the stats only to those have submitted ROLs? Also, I thought most of the FMGs(not us img) are not newly minted graduates, some, if not all need to retake classes in the US schools.
