Value of doing MPH after residency?

[lostintime]

A lot of MD's who do research have MPH's (Master's of Public Health), some from big-shot universities in the US. I looked up the tuition and it's like $48k or something, and even for online.

 

Is there a lot of value in doing this? (besides the 'cool' factor). I mean, it is another 1-2 years of delay before you start earning a physician's salary, puts you into more debt (there are scholarships, but they seem scarce). Is it really only useful if you want to do public health, administrative climb the ladder type of deals, or also for clinical research?

[A-Stark]

Depends entirely on your career goals. There's certainly little reason to blow $48k on an MPH from the US when you can get equivalent education at a Canadian university, regardless of whether it's called an MPH or MHSc. If you're planning on a career in public health, a community medicine residency would be a far better option.

[moo]

The tuition is nothing. I would've gone to the US again in a heartbeat (did my med school at Northwestern) for my MPH. Only problem is I cannot work as a family doc in the US. The tuition is a drop in the bucket compared to the two years of income that you are NOT making as a physician. I would've gotten a far superior education at Hopkins or Harvard for my MPH than at UBC but to me it's not worth losing a potential of 400K in income over the year and a half it would take me to do the MPH.

 

I'm doing a month of research at UCSF this summer and even for that I am cringing at the potential loss of about 20K in income since I can't work in the US. However, for the experience and my career, it is definitely worth it.

 

You should do a MPH (or MHSc) if you plan on doing any sort of clinical epidemiology or clinical research. It lends you a lot of credibility. There's nothing worse than seeing physicians attempt to do research only to have their research torn apart by their peers because they used the wrong study design, didn't power their study enough or something else.

 

In the MHSc program at UBC there are many surgeons and fellows from other specialties. Many who embark on a research and academic career will at some point realize the value of an MPH or MHSc. Not so much for the credentials, but for the knowledge you gain in doing the degree.

[itimebomb2]

wow... moo, you've got your life mapped out to the t's.

[lostintime]

Wow so much info! Don't they also have the online portion? I guess some people also try to do it during their residency to avoid the whole loss of income?

 

What is it about the US programs that makes it so much superior than Canadian ones?

[A-Stark]

I'm not clear on that either. The biggest issue is what you hope to get out of an MPH, i.e. your career goals.

[moo]

You get exposed to a lot of big time research in the US. Big names in epidemiology are at Harvard, Hopkins, UNC-CH, Berkeley, Stanford, UCSF, etc. (A lot of them are Canadian too.) Big epi studies over the past few decades have come out of these places (Framingham being the most famous). Thus it's not necessarily the courses that are different (heck you'd probably learn the same thing reading any epi textbook). It's the exposure you get and the chance to be involved in big epi projects with big names. For me, I'm doing a month at UCSF to establish connections and to hopefully collaborate on future research projects when I'm finished residency and (hopefully) working as a physician epidemiologist at BC Cancer in their cancer prevention and control division.

 

That's not to say Canadian schools are bad. McMaster is known to have a great biostats and epi department (Guyatt is there, the guy who coined the phrase "evidence based medicine"). But to pretend or to say that Canadian MPH programs (even UBC) are on par with some of the bigger names in the US is being a bit ignorant.

 

As a CM resident, I can tell you most of my colleagues will even admit that the big-name US schools are simply superior to our schools. My mentor at UBC even encouraged me to just do the American field epi program rather than the Canadian one because the experience is unparalleled. We've got a long way to go before we catch up to the Americans in the public health education and research programs.

[A-Stark]

Not altogether surprising given that the US actually funds such things adequately, while agencies like the CDC have budgets 20-fold larger than any Canadian equivalents.