residency in the US as a canadian med school grad

[Guest dakar]

Curious whether anyone knows of a resource that outlines what is necessary to prepare for applying for a residency position in a US medical school as a Canadian medical student.

 

I am aware that the USMLE step 1 must be written before the LMCC/USMLE step 2 exams, which are apparently quite similar and worth doing more or less simultaneously.

 

thanks

[Guest DrSahsi]

You may want to take a look at the National Residency Matching Service (NRMP) website at www.nrmp.org

 

Some states will let you practice with just the LMCC, but not many. I have a friend in BC who is a practicing family MD looking to go stateside because of her spouse, and is finding herself having to go through USMLE steps 1-3 in order to qualify for her Visa. I don't know the details (though she is hounding me for USMLE study info).

 

If you're thinking about ducking across the border, do your USMLE steps at the appropriate points during your med school training... before you forget everything!

 

- Rupinder

[Guest Ian Wong]

You need to have written USMLE Steps 1, 2, and 3 in order to qualify for an H1B visa, which I believe lets you practise medicine in the US for up to six years. During that time, you can get started on the process of trying to obtain a Green Card which gives you permanent resident status in the US, and allows you to bank up years towards applying for US citizenship.

 

The visa that Canadian students tend to get (I think), is known as a J1 visa, which has a clause stating that once you finish residency training, you need to return to your home country for a minimum of two years before you can apply for any other Visa from the US. This is known as the home residency requirement, and is designed so that MD's from other countries come to the US to train, but then must return to their home countries to practise (it isn't designed as a gateway for permanent residence in the US).

 

The difficulty then becomes whether your US residency will be sufficient for the Royal College to qualify you to write the Royal College exam in that specialty; without this you can't practice in Canada. Certain specialties, notably Emerg Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics are all completed in less time in the US then they are in Canada, so if you did a residency in the US, and your J1 visa forced you to return to Canada after residency, you may not have sufficient training to write that Royal College exam and practise in Canada.

 

The H1B requires that you have completed all three steps of the USMLE, but the problem is that in most states, you need to have done one year of residency before writing Step 3. Of course, the problem is that in order to have done that first year of US residency, you likely needed to have committed yourself to the J1 visa already, and once you are on the J1 visa, you cannot switch it to an H1B.

 

However, there's a list of a few states which allow you to write the Step 3 without any previous residency training, so theoretically, you could write Steps 1 and 2 in med school, and then upon graduation, travel to one of these states and write Step 3. Then, you would apply for H1B status, and use that to start your US residency. I don't know which states these are, but they are listed in the book: First Aid for the USMLE Step 1 (this book is the best resource from which to prepare for the USMLE).

 

I don't know what the process would be if you'd already completed a Canadian residency and then wanted to move to the US to work.

 

Ian