Exploring "AHEC" centers for US Clinical Experiences

AHEC stands for Area Health Education Center and as the National AHEC website says , the AHEC program was "developed by Congress in 1971 to recruit, train and retain a health professions workforce committed to underserved populations" with 120 medical schools and 600 nursing and allied health schools working together to provide health care experiences to medical students in every state.

Click here to check out an interactive US Map that gives a listing of AHEC centers offering clinical rotations all over the United States - clicking on an individual state gives you the contact person, email and phone numbers of the AHEC centers.

Note that these are generally meant for US Medical school students since they are funded by tax-payers money. However I know an IMG who called up a center in Missouri and not only got a 4 week rotation, they also also arranged for his stay for a mere 75$ for the month, and that was because they did not have enough of their own medical students to rotate at that period. Anyways it would not hurt to try and talk / email politely saying you are an IMG and are looking for an experience with them since you are keen on practicing there after a residency. Though these are hands-on experiences (externships /clerkships), IMGs would most likely be allowed to only observe.

I would suggest a better idea would be to Google individual state AHECs to get mroe information. So for someone - so since we were on the Missouri page, this would be googling for "Missouri AHEC Clinical" and I get this page.

Having said that I would still prefer an experience at a teaching university rather than a non-teaching hospital - but remember the golden rule - some USCE is better than a none at all :-)