Study suggests immigrants provide better medical care than US doctors

Patients treated by international medical graduates had a 11.2 per cent mortality as against 11.6 per cent for those treated by US medical school graduates in the 30 days following hospitalisation, reveals  new study.

The study, was conducted by five researchers from Harvard Medical School -Yusuke Tsugawa, Anupam B Jena, Ruth L Newhouse, E John Orav, and Ashish K Jha - which involved analysing data on Medicare patients who received care from over 44,000 internists doctor of internal medicine] for over 1.2 million hospitalisations in the US.

The researchers found that international medical graduates tended to spend a little more time than US medical school graduates on their patients but this difference was not statistically significant.

It is worth noting that the findings were for doctors born in other countries and not US-born doctors who went to medical schools in other countries.

According to commentators, the results were very broad generalisations and lumped together people from a wide variety of backgrounds, cultures, and personalities.

The say different medical schools offered differing qualities of education and attracted different types of students. Stereotypes of any type, even when positive, tended to overlook the individual and could lead to inaccurate and even harmful conclusions.

They also say that just because one was born in the US and attended a US medical school did not mean one was a worse doctor. Also just because one was an immigrant and went to a foreign medical school did not mean that one was better.

Meanwhile, president Donald Trump's 27 January ban on blocking citizens, including doctors, from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US for 90 days, might have a measurable impact on the US health care system.

According to 2010 data, of approximately 850,000 doctors providing direct patient care in the US, 4,180 physicians were Iranian citizens and 3,412 physicians were Syrian citizens, add commentators.

There were currently 260 people from the seven countries, who were applying for residency slots in US hospitals but now stood banned from coming to the US.

Foreign tudents will learned whether they had been accepted into a programme was on 17 March. If the US were to lose these applicants and could not find candidates to take their spots, it could be concluded from a simple calculation that this could affect 400,000 patients over the next year alone.