Residency in Internal Medicine

[Guest HSR07]

I was just wondering how competitive it is to get into an internal medicine residency? And say, for example, you really want to be a respirologist, how difficult is it to get into the internal subspecialty you want once you're in the program?

[Guest moo]

In the US, not competitive at all, but in Canada, I think it's relatively competitive (not as competitive as derm, optho, ortho), probably on par with Emerg. To be a pulmonologist, it's usually a three year fellowship after your residency in the US. Not sure how many years it is in Canada since the Internal med residency is longer in Canada.

[Guest Ian Wong]

Internal Medicine was significantly harder to match into this year; lots more applicants than in previous years. We'll have to wait until the CaRMS match statistics are released to determine the exact numbers though. I don't know anything about Resp, unfortunately.

 

As far as residency length is concerned, in both Canada and the US, you enter into the Internal Medicine subspecialties after your PGY-3 year. So if you were going into Cardiology, in both Canada and the US, after your PGY-3 year finishes, you start your PGY-4 through PGY-6 years doing the 3-year Cardiology fellowship.

 

The real difference is in general Internal Medicine. In the US, you can practice as a General Internist after just the three years of residency. In Canada, general Internal Medicine needs 4 years, so you've got to complete a PGY-4 year before you can practice as a General Internist (it'd be like doing a 1 year fellowship in General Internal Medicine).

 

Therefore, if you went to the US for an Internal Med residency, you couldn't practice in Canada in General IM until you figured out a way to do a PGY-4 year. If you went to the US for an 3-year Internal Med residency, and then stayed there three more years for your Cardiology fellowship, by then you'd have completed 6 years of post-grad training, just like a Canadian cardiologist would do.

 

I'm not sure in that situation (where you've done the same number of post-grad years as an equivalent Canadian graduate) if your US training would completely transfer back to Canada; you'd have to talk to the Royal College about that.

 

Ian