NY Times: New York Hospitals Create Outcry in Foreign Deal

[marmar]

New York Hospitals Create Outcry in Foreign Deal
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: August 5, 2008



New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation has signed a 10-year, $100 million contract with a profit-making medical school in the Caribbean to provide clinical training for hundreds of students at the city’s 11 public hospitals.

The unusual deal, proposed by a member of the corporation’s board who has long worked for the Caribbean school, has been met by an outcry from New York medical schools fearing that clerkship slots will grow scarcer and that they might have to increase tuitions to compete.

Critics worry that the hospital corporation, whose mission is to serve the city’s poor, is conferring prestige on a foreign school whose curriculum, they say, is more vocational than research-based and often caters to affluent students who could not get into schools in the United States.

They say that the contract, with St. George’s University School of Medicine on the island of Grenada, has turned a meritocracy into a bounty system in which struggling city hospitals collect more for every St. George’s student they take, and could squeeze out local students.

“This changes the whole dynamic from an academic relationship to a dollar-based relationship,” said Dr. Michael J. Reichgott, associate dean for clinical affairs and graduate medical education at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/nyregion/05grenada.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[arendt]

1. Great, now they're outsourcing medical training. This country is so over. n/t