Since 25% of the physicians in the US now are graduates of foreign medical schools, virtually all of you have worked with international medical graduates (IMGs). Almost everyone who goes into health care wants to help people keep or regain good health, and most IMGs are well intended health care practitioners, but not all of them are easy to work with.
1) Have your work experiences with foreign doctors been largely positive, negative, or mixed?
2) Do you have a story which exemplifies your working relationship with foreign-born doctors?
3) If you had to give advice to an IMG who is about to begin working in the US, what would you tell him/her?
There are also examples of foreign doctors behaving in ways that would lead one to believe that they are either ignorant or careless of american culture. Just take a gander at:
Now, perhaps an american-born doctor might try this, but I'd bet money they'd wouldn't try this because they understand that our predominant culture will not put up with this type of behavior.
Jane,
I have just gone through all 29 pages of discussion from the incident where the male MD slapped the nurse (and he eventually got fired). Unless I missed it, there was no mention of the MD's being foreign-born. Can you help me here?
Alan
See post #15 in that thread.
(I'm close to computer illiterate and don't know how to post the link)
Thanks for pointing that out to me. (In my flashing through the hundreds of responses, I just missed thread #15.) This story will be a really good example for me to include in future training sessions, especially since I usually have Pakistani doctors in the seminars. (BTW, BagLady, it's not hard to get a URL to show up on this interface. Just copy-paste it into your post and the interface will automatically transform it into a link.)
I do want to point out that being a jerk is not restricted to IMGs. In the US, surgical culture has too long tolerated macho male arrogance in the OR. I know of a (now-retired) male surgeon who used to throw instrument trays in the OR when he was upset. The hospital "spoke" to him about this but never disciplined or fired him. I will grant you that being under pressure, having a Y-chromosome-induced short fuse, AND being a non-native speaker will probably combine to create some "incidents" in the hospital, so yeah, there will definitely be some IMGs behaving poorly. Some IMGs, however, are real sweethearts, as I'm sure most of you have experienced.
bagladyrn, RN
2,286 Posts