Could the state-funded International Medical Graduate Assistance Program do more for immigrant doctors — and help address Minnesota’s looming doctor shortage?
Before Mervat Lotfalla immigrated to the United States eight years ago, she spent more than 15 years working as a doctor at various hospitals in Egypt. In that period, Lotfalla — who graduated from Cairo University School of Medicine in 1994 — served as the head of Mallawy General Hospital’s emergency department, leading hundreds of staffers to provide adequate health services for rural communities there. Then in 2009, as political unrest started brewing in her homeland, Lotfalla and her family left Egypt and established a new life in Minnesota, where she hoped to continue her career in medicine. A year later, she began the process to get her license to practice medicine in the U.S. She passed all the examinations, but when she applied to get into a medical residency, the hands-on clinical practice experience that doctors must undergo to obtain their licenses, “I didn’t get interviews,” she said. Lotfalla is one of many foreign-trained immigrant and refugee physicians who often struggle to put their decades-long experience to use — even as many parts of Minnesota face a shortage for doctors. To remedy that shortage — and to address some of the barriers that prevent foreign-trained physicians from re-entering their…
