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The MedEdits Advisors and Editors 

Medical Admissions Updates

The Association of American Medical Colleges meeting this year was fantastic. We attended sessions about medical school admissions, medical education, and residency training. This meeting allows us to stay up to date with the current trends in medical education so we can offer clients the best guidance and support. Click Here for meeting highlights and stay tuned for MedEdits articles and blog posts related to what we learned.

ERAS Resources

By Jessica Freedman, MD, MedEdits

The Association of American Medical Colleges has terrific resources this year to guide applicants through the residency application process. The most notable addition to their library of resources includes video tutorials about how to navigate the web-based application.

Click Here to access the AAMC ERAS resources.

If you are interested in working with me on interview preparation this year, I encourage you to retain my services as soon as possible. I am currently booked for the remainder of this summer but I am forming a wait list. Every year I have clients who postpone their plans to apply and I will turn to the wait list to fill their "spots." If you are interested in working with me this summer, contact our office.

I am also accepting clients for the 2010/2011 application season.

I encourage applicants to hire our editors for help with documents. MedEdits' small group of professional editors are all trained by me in the art of medical admissions.

Medical School Enrollment

By Jessica Freedman MD, MedEdits

As most medical school applicants know, the Association of American Medical Colleges planned to increase United States allopathic medical school enrollment by 30% by the year 2015. The actual increase will be 23% by 2015. This data is outlined in the 2009 Medical School Enrollment Survey. Based on the results of the 2010 residency match, the competition for residency positions is increasing. Unless the number of residency training positions also increases, matching will become even more competitive. This is especially concerning for US citizen and non-US citizen international medical graduates.

The Doctor Shortage: The Need For More Residency Positions

Dr. Darrell Kirch, president of the Association of American Colleges (AAMC), whom I heard speak at the annual AAMC meeting in November 2009, wrote an op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend about the need to increase the number of residency positions in the United States to alleviate the looming doctor shortage.

He mentions that US medical schools aim to increase class sizes by 30% to ease this shortage. Something else to consider is the growing number of both Caribbean medical school graduates, most of whom are US citizens, and the traditional international medical graduates who are not US citizens.The potential ramifications of increases in US medical school class sizes as well as of these two other groups of applicants are twofold:

1) The competition to obtain a residency position will become fierce. And in this more competitive environment, programs may not necessarily show a preference for US students. Indeed, with many excellent students now going to Caribbean medical schools, some programs prefer to take international medical graduates.

2) If the increase in the number of US medical school graduates is not accompanied by a parallel increase in the number or residency training positions, many able people, both US citizens and non-US citizens, will be unable to obtain residency positions and therefore can not practice medicine in the US.

The AAMC must collaborate with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to ensure that we don't create a bottleneck of residency applicants.

The AAMC also has a great physician workforce resource page. When asked about the problems in health care today on your medical school interview, why not give an answer that is a little different than the rest?

Visit: MedEdits

Discussion About The Doctor Shortage on NPR

Listen to this discussion with Dr. Atul Grover from the Association of American Medical Colleges on NPR about the looming doctor shortage. He mentions many topics including the importance of increasing the number of residency training slots, medical students specialty choice and the implications of an aging population.

ERAS Worksheet and Resources

As residency applicants get ready to submit their residency applications, they should review the materials offered by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) that may help. Most important is the ERAS worksheet which outlines what is required for the ERAS application, character limits, experience categories etc.

Find your ERAS resources to download here.

Visit: MedEdits