Anyone have experience of studying medicine in English in Europe?

[rickyrickygrimes]

I work in an international school in France. All the students are English / French bilingual, and I specifically advise students looking to study at university in English. I'm getting requests quite often from students who want to study medicine / vet, but they don't want to stay in France (where the system is brutal with competitive exams throughout). The problems is that the countries we usually send students to just don't work for medicine.
US & Canada - can't study medicine as an undergrad, they'd have to do a first degree and then take med as a postgrad. possibly, but it's a long haul / cost.
Netherlands - the only English-taught medicine course has recently been discontinued.
Ireland - insanely competitive. They'd need to get 21/20 in their Bac to have a chance.
UK - since Brexit they mostly qualify as international students = insane fees.

So increasingly they are asking me about studying medicine (and vet) in other European countries - Malta, Greece, Romania, Latvia among others. I understand the 'official' line - the degrees which have been approved by the EU should be accepted across the EU. The issue is being accepted to actually work as / register as a Dr in other countries after qualifying. I suspect that the UK would snap them up, while France is very very resistant to allowing Drs trained elsewhere to register.

Anyone got experience of these courses? And their post-qualification acceptance?

@tumtumtumtime @Maersk @Melassa

My DD is bilingual, so we weren't concerned with that aspect when we looked into the Cluj medical school. However, from what I remember, you can opt to take a one-year prep course to learn Romanian, but even if you don't, you take Romanian language classes in the first year (I'm not sure if they were mandatory, but it would make sense).

The med school curriculum at UMF Cluj is preclinical for the first two years, which gives you time to learn the language. Also, large cities in Romania are full of immigrants and expats, and you get patient contact in English as their Romanian will be limited or nonexistent.

Well, they have to learn the local language for sure. My friend's daughter has been learning Hungarian for two years. Some kids are better with languages than others.

Tuition fees (for non-EU) in their best schools are something like €10K per year, so they aren't cheap.

Pretty much all the students I'm advising are EU citizens, so they'd qualify for reduced fees. Compared to £30-40,000 a year international fees for medicine in the UK (whereas before Brexit they were free in Scotland and home fees elsewhere) it seems more more accessible. Plus lower cost of living compared to the UK?

Here's the very detailed curriculum; it looks like Romanian is mandatory in years 1-3.

umfcluj.ro/en/medicine/education/undergraduate-studies/medicine/curricula/

Here in Germany I get the impression that young people choose English med courses in Romania when they can’t get into one in Germany - either because their grades aren’t quite good enough for a German school or because they have to go on a waiting list (you get additional points for the time you‘ve ‘waited’ since finishing from school). So the requirements in Eastern Europe are definitely lower than here in Germany. I think they then transfer to a German hospital for their post-degree clinical phase (Arzt in Praktikum), which also ensures that their qualifications will be accepted.

And I met a British guy last year who had done his vetinary qualification in Slovakia and was now working perfectly normally in the UK as a vet. He had learned enough Slovakian to get by for the ‘talking to the animals’ owners’ aspect if it.

@LadyGreySpillsTheTea That is only true for some schools. The best medical schools in Romania will not have lower requirements, and it's very tough to get in. The appeal for international students (especially non-EU students) is the tuition and the cost of living.

It’s a big ask for a 16/17 yr old to project that far forward, especially when they already have an international profile 🤷‍♀️

They need to. Where they study will matter.

The point I was making was that as well as the medical school they need to look at the path beyond. This is where the crunch point comes. As can be seen from this thread, there is a prolifera of medical courses across Europe taught in English and designed for overseas students. And these numbers are dwarfed by a huge number of private medical schools in Asia. In parallel there is an issue in many countries, including some in Asia, where there is a shortage of entry level jobs because people using the private sector want to see someone senior and experienced, whilst the state sector is weak.

Hence the problem of unemployed young doctors. Not just here, but across the world. Our problem however is of our own making. Most countries require employers to hire qualified residents before looking overseas. Since 2019 the NHS can hire, using transparent criteria not linked to residence or nationality, anyone qualified from anywhere in the world. International applicants have been encouraged through various incentives like exemptions from key exams and expedited family settlement rights. This has led to a huge increase in applications for both training and entry level staff jobs. New graduates from British medical schools are then struggling to compete with applicants from overseas who will often be able to offer more experience.

Ireland were always up front. They had a lot of overseas students but did not promise them Foundation training. A decade ago this was not a big problem as North Americans could return home and the UK would take others. Post Brexit demand for their medical school places from EU applicants will have exploded, and Ireland is under an obligation to give equal consideration to all EU residents for Foundation jobs. They won't want people raised in Ireland and wanting to stay in Ireland being squeezed out, so they are probably engineering it so that those with Irish Leaving Certs gain more points. (Ireland has also started funding medical school places in Northern Ireland for Irish citizens who are committed to working in the Republic post qualification, as it is also hard for Irish citizens with A levels to gain places in the Republic.)

I doubt that Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland or other countries running English language medical schools are able to offer many post graduation foundation type jobs either. You have already suggested that gaining registration in France with a degree from overseas can be a problem.

There is still some value in a UK medical degree, though expensive for those outside the UK. DD and many of her peers were unemployed in August when they finished F2 but they are slowly finding work. DD has a super locum job, genuinely demanding and giving her bags of experience. Having a UK degree and good NHS experience is an advantage for locum jobs as hospitals want people who can hit the ground running, even if something more permanent would be hard to get. Australia too seems to like post foundation graduates from the UK and Ireland, and getting a job there for next year has been straight forward. I do not know if the same applies to degrees from Bulgaria or elsewhere. Similarly though the French system is tough, if you get through it, getting a job should be straightforward.

(The tactic used by one French mother in London was for her DD to start in the French system - she had not got a place in the UK - and if she failed the first year, she had a deferred place lined up elsewhere. Apparently the failure rate at the end of the first year is very high but after that it is not as bad.)

TD:LR There is a world-wide over supply of medical school graduates who are seeking entry level jobs and training. Many countries, even within the EU, operate open or covert protectiveness to protect their own residents/graduates from their medical schools. The UK had gone against this trend but will eventually to change their approach.

she sounds unhinged but you did it to lighten the mood and get a laugh out of the other people at her expense. You knew she wouldn’t laugh just the others so you made fun of her - what would you call this?

I’d be very interested to hear how @Needmoresleep and @Melassa imagine that Leaving Certificate grades are being artificially inflated to advantage Irish medicine applicants? Who is doing this, and when? Individual markers of a paper?

No. Irish Leaving Cert grades are not artificially inflated.

Entry is based on points which come from school results and from an aptitude test. You get so many points for certain results in the Leaving Cert. You get so many points for an A level. You get so many points for certain scores in the Bac. The weighting given to the Irish Leaving Cert results is probably more generous. It would be difficult to get enough points to get a place without 4 A levels including Maths, or without near perfection in the French Bac. That said it is still pretty hard for Irish residents to get into medical school.

At the end of the day all countries need doctors who are happy to spend their careers in rural or hard to recruit places. The best option is often people who come from those areas.

This is what i understand the situation to be. Culturally, 'rigorous' marking is the norm in France - it fits with the belief that competition and selection of the crème off the top is the best way to identify the elite students in each cohort and (to an extent) assign them to the correct niveau / level in their future studies. Step out of the French system and it disadvantages students who are competing with, say, A Level students. While it's entirely possible (albeit very difficult) to get 3 or 4 x A levels at A*, it's vanishingly rare to get 20/20 in the Bac - culturally, it's impossible to achieve perfection. Most unis in the UK contextualise their Bac offers to take this into account, but in Ireland it's purely down to points gained from the score in the Bac.

@Needmoresleep Thank you for your very detailed post. This thread has been very helpful, not least in teaching me that there is so much variation in the type, quality and entrance requirements across the EU in this respect.

I haven't read the whole thread but just coming on here to say that my DD studied medicine in Pleven (Bulgaria). She finished 2 years ago. The degree is GMC accredited and she worked as a locum in the UK for a year before moving to Greece, where she is training in surgery (she married a Greek guy, who also studied at Pleven).

It was around €7000 a year. It's a perfectly good option (although living in Bulgaria could be a bit frustrating at times, she said), and both the fees and the cost of accomodation and living were much cheaper than the UK. I gave her an allowance of £600 a month to cover everything and she did fine.

Out of interest, my other DD studied veterinary medicine in Wroclaw in Poland. About the same course price and allowance for her. She finished a year ago and worked first in Ireland and then the UK, where she is now. No problems with registering with the RCVS.

Both of them had undergrad and honours degrees in the UK before they started those couses abroad. The vet one also had a research Masters. Despite that, they didn't get in to UK courses. It seems mad to me!

PS I am a doctor too and as far as I could see the standard of the course at Pleven was very good.

Well, exactly. A ‘home’ selection system isn’t generally going to bend itself out of shape to accommodate overseas students, unless it particularly needs or wants to attract them. I love France and lived there before I had my son, but wouldn’t have wanted to put him through that education system.

The likelihood of anyone being able to learn enough adequate Romanian/Hungarian/etc from scratch to adequately meet the demands of communication with patients is enough to make me highly suspicious of the adequacy of these courses for non-bilingual students. We have requirements for standards of English for those coming to the UK from abroad to work in healthcare and we still have plenty of problems with miscommunication if you work with the elderly,mentally ill,learning disabled etc.

Just one anecdote, but through volunteering for a charity I met a young doctor from the UK who studied medicine at an Eastern European university. They are a qualified doctor, and have completed the F1 post qualification year in the uni country. Their medical qualification is recognised by the GMC so they are registered to practise in the UK. But they cannot find a job as a doctor in the UK, they need to do the F2 year but they are not in the UK system. This young person was applying for jobs such as HCA. I found it very sad, especially given our shortage of doctors.

My DD who studied in Bulgaria became completely fluent in Bulgarian (part of the course for the first 2 years was language classes). Now she lives and works in Greece she speaks fluent Greek. My other DD is fluent in Polish. Some people are just good at languages!

@RedBurnett I can't believe they cannot find F2 level locum work anywhere. I am not sure what you mean by "not in the UK system". They might need to look far and wide, my DD went to Enniskillen for a while, but the work is certainly there there. Working as an HCA would be such a waste of their time as it wouldn't count towards anything when they apply for their higher training.

@Redburnett was is more sad is the lack of jobs and opportunities for those medica graduating from uni and training in the UK (at tax payers expense) as the NHS has been rather too keen to import qualified staff from abroad to work in the UK rather than aid the progress of those already in the UK ! Makes no sense.

Irish leaving cert points are still artificially inflated since covid. The level of inflation was reduced this year and will gradually go back to pre-covid levels. The inflation is one of the reasons there have been a few courses with entry points off 625 ending up with random allocation.

I think they should have pulled the plaster off and gone back to pre-covid. To make it fair they would need to adjust covid inflated points downwards for entry. There would have been uproar at any downward adjustment though.

The course in Malta is in English and is internationally recognised. As far as I am aware the course is free for EU nationals. It’s worth looking into. https://www.um.edu.mt/courses/overview/umdft-2025-6-o/

I do not know enough about the UK system to understand why the person I met cannot get a F2 job. I am not sure if someone who had only completed F1 without F2 would be eligible for locum work, I do not know enough about the system. I do agree that the situation after F2 re: further training places is unfair to UK trained doctors.

@theDudesmummy I think the locum market two years ago was less saturated. When DD was an F1 one of her friends went off on long term sick and was replaced by a locum who had failed F1 a few times but was still able to locum, though not as an F2 or senior. This year he would be competing against people who have finished F2 so is likely to be struggling for work.

One reason DD has her current locum job is that they apparently had three or four attempts are hiring more senior locums from elsewhere in the UK but none stayed, so decided to take someone with less experience but who had worked in relevant areas in the hospital and was a known entity.

I am sure the NHS thought they were onto a good thing by being able to recruit world wide and so picking up experienced doctors at the bottom of the pay scale. Even the BMA supported the move. Observation suggests that there are issues beyond leaving our own young doctors unemployed, which include a wide variation in quality of different medical degrees and motivation and retention. Its not great suddenly finding yourself at the bottom of the heap when you have years of good experience in your own country. Its not great if your salary does not stretch as far as it should. Its not great if your are stuck in the middle of hard-to-recruit nowhere away from your community. Nor is it much fun if you cannot see a career path or access to training. And if you are on a fixed term contract you risk having nothing at the end.

It is a mess. But Asian friends tell me that the unemployment situation in Asia is far worse, and they still seem to be looking to the UK/Ireland for their children.