How to become a doctor in the UK as an international medical graduate I Dr Ezgi Ozcan

Hello everyone and welcome back to my channel. Today I wanted to take the opportunity to answer a question I've had many times and that is how do I become a doctor in the UK as an international graduate? I wanted to go through the application process with you today and just give you some more information about each component but please bear in mind that I myself haven't gone through this whole process so I won't be able to give you any more information than I already have in this video but I'll be sure to link websites and forums down below where you can read up about the topic in your own time. Before we do any more explaining we need to clarify a few things. The first and most important thing is the GMC. This is the General Medical Council and essentially it is the organization or body that gives doctors the license to practice medicine in the UK so if you do not have a license you cannot practice medicine here and essentially the whole application process is based around getting this license and then applying for jobs once you have that. It is a quite complicated process and it is different for everyone. The second thing to clarify is an internship. This is a time period just before or after you graduate where you work within a public hospital with at least 12 to 18 months of work with three months of that at least being in general medicine and three months of that being surgery. So you need to get some sort of certificate or a letter from this institute to define all the hours that you've worked and the days you've worked so you can produce that as evidence. So that's the GMC license and internship. If you don't have an internship you'd need to apply for a provisional GMC license. If you do have an internship you can go on and directly apply for a full license and I'll go into what they mean as well. So the third thing to clarify is the PLAB. This is the Professional and Linguistic Assessment Board. It's an exam that's made up of two parts. Part one is an MCQ based paper or I think it's based on computers actually and you can sit this overseas in the test centres that are available on their website. The second one which is part two is an OSCE. This is where you have clinical scenarios with patients and you have an examiner watching you. This part of the exam is based in the UK in Manchester so you'd need to fly out to the UK to sit this part of the exam. The fourth component is an English language test and this forms of two different types of exams that you can take. The first one is the IELTS and the second one is the OET. The OET is the newer exam and I think it came out in February but you can sit either to prove that you have the adequate amount of English to practice in the UK. Now that we've clarified those things we can go into the process. So just to give you the basics, a medical student graduating from the UK applies for the Foundation Training Programme. So this is a two-year training programme with the first year being called the FY1 and the second year being called the FY2. And when you complete medical school you get a provisional licence and when you complete your first FY1 year you get your full licence. And then once you've completed those foundation years you can go into training, take up trust grade posts or leave training if you like. Now if you don't have an internship you'd need to get a provisional licence. Once you've done that you need to find an institute in the UK that will supervise you and sign you off at the end of that year to basically confirm that you can have a full licence and have competence as a senior house officer or a doctor that's senior and a new graduate. Now I understand that most of international graduates would have an internship and the rest of the application sort of depends on where you've done your medical school. So if you've done medical school in an EU country or in Switzerland you're less likely to be asked to do the PLAB exam and you may just be asked to do the English language exam. Once you've done this you'll be given your full licence and then you can go on with the next part of your application. If you've studied medicine outside of the EU or Switzerland you'd most likely have to do the PLAB. Now I'm saying most likely because if you do your application and the GMC feel as though the curriculum that you studied in that medical school fits a graduate doctor in the UK and they're happy with that they may not ask you to do this exam but this is entirely up to them and it is something that you need to verify with If originally you are not an EU or Swiss national or a UK national then you need to also look into having the right to work in the UK. So you need to apply for a visa and have that visa in your passport as part of your GMC application. Down below I'll link the website to the GMC. You go through a series of questions and based on your personal circumstances and it'll give you a breakdown of what you need to do and submit to get this licence. So imagine now you have your licence which is the most laborious part of the whole process. You then need to decide what you want to do. I spoke about the Foundation Programme. Some of you can apply for the Stand Alone Foundation Year 2. The advantage of this is it's part of a training programme and so you'll be However there aren't many of these positions so it might not be likely that you get a place. Secondly you can apply as a trust grade SHO. So a trust grade means you're not within a training programme but you're just contracted to work as a doctor for that hospital. You can still work within a speciality but you won't be in an official training programme and this is often the route that international medical graduates take. It gives them time to get used to the NHS, build up their confidence, build a rapport and their portfolio and then they go on to apply for training programmes. So some of these training programmes are the core medical training CMT, GP training for general practitioners and ACCS which is for A&E trainings and anaesthetic etc. So that was a very brief overview on the application process for being a doctor in the UK. If you yourself have gone through this process and are currently working in the UK please leave a comment down below about your experiences, exactly what you did, the resources you used and the pathways you took which will be very helpful to those reading the comments section. Thank you very much for watching my video and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!