NY Medical Schools Upset At Caribbean Medical Schools

<a href="http://www.sgu.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">St. George's University</a> in Grenada, West Indies

There's a turf war going on in New York's hospitals, and it's not between doctors and nurses or insurance companies and hospital staffs... it's between NY State medical schools and foreign medical schools. According to the NY Times, the sixteen NY State medical schools are waging "an aggressive campaign to persuade the State Board of Regents to make it harder, if not impossible, for foreign schools to use New York hospitals as extensions of their own campuses."

What's at stake are clinical training positions at NY hospitals (which could be even more precious what with closing and troubled hospitals all around)—right now, 4,400 medical students from NY State med schools train in NY hospitals while 2,200 foreign medical students are training in NY hospitals. With an expected shortage of 90,000 doctors in the U.S. by 2020, NY State med schools wants 15-30% more positions, but foreign medical schools say their students are more likely to practice internal medicine, while their American-med school counterparts opt to specialize in higher-paying areas.

NY State medical schools are accusing foreign schools like St. George's in Grenada of not being real educational institutions; a professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine sniffed, "These are designed to be for-profit education mills to train students to pass the boards, which is all they need to get a license." St. George's also has a 10-year $100 million contract with the city to send its students to NYC hospitals, which has been defended as a way to get medical students into poorer neighborhoods.

However, one St. George's graduate, who graduated from Cornell with a 3.97 GPA (bio major), said that she went to the West Indian school because her MCAT score, a 27, was too low for an American School. Janine Reindhardt, a Massapequa native, is now a resident in emergency medicine at Stony Brooke, "At St. George’s, we’re rejected from the U.S. schools and then we feel we have something to prove, as opposed to the sense of entitlement that some U.S. medical students might feel."