Aid to Foreign Medical Graduates Returning from Ukraine

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• Jul 29, 2022 | Sourav Boruah

Digital Desk: The National Medical Commission announced on
Friday that final-year students who returned to India as a result of Covid and
the Russia-Ukraine war and received their degrees from their institutions on or
before June 30, 2022, will be eligible to take the Foreign Medical Graduate
exam.

They would be expected to complete a Compulsory Rotating Medical
Internship (CRMI) for two years rather than the current one year after passing
the Foreign Medical Graduate (FMG) test, the NMC announced in a public notice.

 The relaxation given to the international medical students is a
"one-time measure" and shall not be viewed as "precedence in the
future," it added, adding that the foreign medical graduates will only be
able to seek registration after finishing the two-year CRMI.

According to the Supreme Court's order from April 29, Indian
students who were enrolled in their final year of an undergraduate medical
programme (and had to leave their foreign medical institute and return to India
due to COVID-19, the Russia-Ukraine war, etc.) and who subsequently completed
their studies and received a certificate of completion of the programme from
their respective institute on or before June 30, 2022, shall be permitted to
practise medicine in the United States.

The notice stated: "Thereafter, upon passing the FMG
examination, such foreign medical graduates are required to undergo CRMI for a
period of two years to make up for the clinical training which they were unable
to physically attend during the undergraduate medicine course in the foreign
institute as well as to familiarise them with the practise of medicine under
Indian conditions."

On April 29, the Supreme Court ordered the regulating
authority to develop a plan within two months to allow MBBS students impacted
by the epidemic and the Russia-Ukraine war to finish their clinical rotations
in local medical colleges as a one-time solution.