Country of qualification is linked to doctors’ General Medical Council performance assessment rate, but is it linked to their clinical competence?

• Main Author: Richard Wakeford
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: BMC 2017-08-01
• Series: BMC Medicine
• Subjects: Revalidation; Assessment of competence; Clinical assessment; International graduates; Underperformance
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12916-017-0918-1

Abstract Mehdizadeh and colleagues recently described the prevalence of General Medical Council regulatory performance assessments by doctors’ country of primary medical qualification. This article has caused anger within the UK–international medical community because it identifies graduates of certain countries with significantly raised prevalence. The present article comments on evidence from published Royal College of General Practitioners’ data that support these conclusions. However, in an increasingly international age of medical education, the ambiguity of attributions of qualifying from a certain country needs addressing. Some medical students of British nationality, for example, who fail to obtain a place at a UK medical school, train in medical schools abroad, and thus may be identified as international medical graduates. Please see related article: https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-017-0903-6 .