Do non-US MDs do anything like board certification?

[penta]

So. For a story I'm writing, one of the primary characters is an MD from Israel.

Problem: I'm trying to figure out how old the character should be, and running into the problem that I have no idea how long post-med-school training takes (I know med school is 6 years at most Israeli universities (except when its 4, what the heck?) and starts with 3 years of undergrad coursework, thanks to some googling, though) or even if it is a thing outside of the US.

To illustrate what I mean, a US MD would (to my knowledge) do:

4 years undergrad (lets figure 18-22)
4 years med school (22-26)
residency in whatever specialty for a few years (3-5?) (27-30?)
fellowship leading to board certification. (I have no idea.)

And then the number of potential paths branches off into infinity so I don't track that when trying to age a character.

I don't have the faintest clue though what "medical education after med school" looks like for docs outside the US or if it's even a thing that exists. Double the confusion with Israel given the presence of conscription and stuff.

What I googled: ""medical education" Israel" ""medical residency" Israel" ""medical specialties" Israel" and similar searches with Europe in place of Israel.

Comments

[recessional]

It's likely to depend somewhat on where, exactly?

Like here in Canada: http://admissionmyths.med.ubc.ca/discover/is-medical-school-right-for-me/

How long residency is will depend on what you want to be: it can be anything from two years for a bog standard general practice, to six or seven years for neurosurgery. After residency you write your certification exam with the College (of whatever specialty you're being certfied as).

It looks like Israel does medical school https://en.universities-colleges.org.il/30/ which is the same as American/Canadian med school (do your pre-med undergrad, do four years of med school) and then requires an internship and then get their license https://www.health.gov.il/English/Services/MedicalAndHealthProfessions/GeneralMedicine/Pages/License_medicine_Israel.aspx - there's a link in there to what Internship in Israel amounts to.

Apparently as of 2016 to get your license you not only have to do the internship but also submit a thesis, but that probably wouldn't apply to your char.


I got these by literally googling "how to become a physician canada" and "how to become a physician israel" - I usually start straight up with that kind of thing, bcause Google at this point is actually pretty optimized to answer those questions/do those searches with the assumption that you are someone who is looking to find out about the process (whateve the process is) as someone going through it, and thus tends to parse the words and syntax in a way that comes up with this kind of data.

If it hadn't given me those answers (and one would probably need the name of the specific European country), I'd've tried again with "medical license [country name]" or "medical practice certification [country name]".

[penta]

Thanks for that! (especially the help re formatting Google queries - I always remember being taught to *avoid* natural language searches with search engines...)

[recessional]

Which was probably true when you were being taught it! And for engines working with less complexity than Modern Google, which is TER.I.FY.ING. in what it parses.

For instance it would probably get you nowhere searching, say (because it's my alma mater and I spent A LOT OF TIME finding shit through Summon, the Big Broad Search, there) the University of British Columbia's library general search! Which iirc does't even use specific boolean operators in a consistent fashion. And so on.

But with Google because it's actually oritented (as a business) to Jo/e Random who wants to find out (for instance) whether they can practice medicine in Israel without having to completely recertify, they've put a looooot of work into figuring out how to make every-day questions like this one (or "how to repair my door" or "how to find someone's address" or "where to buy shoes in New Zealand" or whatever) pull relevant and useful pages.

It's less useful for stuff that gets kind of arcane: there are thousands of people a day who'd want to know how to get licensed as a medical professional but there aren't that many people, for instance, who want to know how to, I dunno, identify watermarks on a letter from the 17th century. Or that kind of thing.

But it's to the point now where I definitely start with either straight up the question if it's a "how to" or "where is" or "who" or whatever question, or just by plugging keywords without any operators into the search field, and seeing what that gets me - a lot of the times, within the first couple pages there will be my answer.

If not, well then I start fussing around with operators and advanced search and things get more complicated.

[anotherslashfan]

While reading up on this topic online, I saw a mention that because of the mandatory military service, students usually start university two to three years later than elsewhere, i.e. at age 20/21 (women usually serve two years, men three).

[penta]

Yeah, I knew that already. However: There are also deferments to the draft for medical students, though I have no idea how that works in practice.