Clerkships, the nightmare of IMGs!
Clerkships, Clerkships and more Clerkships! It seems like the flood gates have opened and more graduates of schools that have geographically separated campuses are encountering problems with licensure in Texas.
Geographically Separated Campuses is just a politically correct way to say – I did my basic sciences on the school campus and my clinical sciences elsewhere. It appears that no matter the age of the school, ie; St. George’s or AUC or Ross or the experience of their faculty and staff students are increasingly finding difficulty finding the right clerkships to meet Texas standards.
Here is a little hint – when planning your clinical rotations and if you are fairly certain your future is in Texas then make sure you can document the relationship between the hospital you are doing a clerkship in and an entry on the ACGME or AOA program sites. For example, if you are doing a Peds rotation at say Specialty for Children, Capital Plaza, Austin, TX you want to be sure that you walk away with a copy of the affiliation agreement that Specialty for Children has with Dell Children’s for specifically the year you did or are doing your rotation. You see, the TMB staff cannot currently see anything after the 2012-2013 AMA green book on the ACGME site, so they need documentation that where you did your rotation, if it was done at a lower level participating site, was indeed accredited for the time period when you were in rotation. Make sense? I hope so!