COVID-19: Medical colleges abroad fast-track graduation to add doctors

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Team Careers360 | April 1, 2020 | 01:40 PM IST

NEW DELHI: This year’s graduating medical students at Harvard University will have an option to receive their diplomas early to enable them to join the COVID-19 fight quickly.

The unprecedented coronavirus pandemic has overwhelmed existing medical staff at hospitals across the world. To deal with this, medical schools in several countries including the US, UK, Ireland, Italy are considering early graduation for final-year students so that they can quickly be deployed to hospitals where resources are strained due to the increasing COVID-19 cases.

Many students have volunteered and expressed eagerness to join the hospitals on the front lines to help treat patients amid this pandemic, say media reports from these countries.

The countries

Italy is the worst-hit country in the coronavirus pandemic. With over one lakh COVID-19 cases and a death toll raging at 12400, Italy’s healthcare system is at a breaking point.

The situation is getting worse as doctors and nurses are also getting infected because of inadequate protective gear. According to CNN, 61 doctors have died due to coronavirus infection.

The Italian government scrapped the final exams for medical students to enable them to enter the healthcare system nine-months before the scheduled graduation time.

In the US, medical students who have completed their training and degree requirements at Harvard University, Boston University, Tufts University, New York University and the University of Massachusetts, are being given the option of receiving their diplomas before their scheduled graduation date in May, as reported by Harvard Gazette.

In third and fourth year of medical school, students move from classroom learning to hands-on learning in clinical rotations in various specialties such as pediatrics, surgery, psychiatry and family medicine at hospitals and clinics, which also help them decide which field they’d like to enter. But if they formally graduate, they will lose their ‘student’ status and along with it, their health insurance, housing, visas and moratorium on repaying loans will be impacted.

In the UK, medical schools are fast-tracking the qualifications for final-year students, waiving some clinical exams and considering alternative assessments to allow the students to quickly register as doctors, reported the Guardian.

Ireland is also planning on drawing up on medical graduates to ease pressure on its health services.The Irish Times reported that the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) has advanced the final exams by six weeks, allowing 1,300 medical students to graduate early and join the health service by April.