Patients treated by immigrant docs in US have lower death rate

Patient death rate in the US is lower for immigrant doctors from countries such India and Pakistan, as compared to trained medical graduates from American medical schools, according to a new study that comes amidst the immigrant controversy triggered by President Donald Trump.

The researchers, including those from Harvard Medical School in the US, examined whether patient outcomes varied by countries where international medical graduates were trained.

They were restricted to eight countries with the largest number of international medical graduates going to the US - India, Pakistan, Philippines, Syria, Nigeria, Mexico, Egypt, and China - to avoid unstable estimates.

In the US, international graduates are largely from India, the Philippines and Pakistan - not including US citizens who have gone abroad for medical education and returned to the US to practice.

The researchers said that current standards of selecting international medical graduates for practice in the US "appear sufficiently rigorous to ensure high quality care."

International medical graduates make up a quarter of the physician workforce in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

Although international graduates are required to pass examinations to practice medicine in the UK and US, concerns have been raised about the quality of care provided by these graduates.

Yet no study has still now investigated differences in patient outcomes between international medical graduates and US medical graduates using nationally representative data.