Critics have been making the rounds again with a warmed-over complaint: International medical schools that offer U.S. teaching hospitals financial support for clerkship programs are unfairly buying access for their students instead of “more deserving” U.S.-based students. As the proud dean of a Caribbean medical school, I want to set the record straight yet again: This argument is hollow and based on a false dichotomy. In fact, the argument has long been settled in practice, and here’s why:
Education has a value, teaching hospitals deserve and often need the resources to conduct that education, and we are helping create more training capacity at a time when the physician shortage mandates more resources, not fewer.
To make clinical training possible, an environment must be created that allows for safe patient care in the presence of learners and provides the educational experience necessary for medical students to become physicians. Creating and sustaining this patient and learner-centered environment requires an infrastructure — which in turn requires resources. At American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine (AUC), we believe that the medical education system should provide these resources and not an already drained health care system — one that will inevitably pass costs on to patients or taxpayers or both.
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