Knowledge Bank
Practising difficult conversations with an AI patient
Back to Menu ↩ Good doctors do not simply tell patients what to do. They explain the options, listen to the patient’s values and concerns,
September 28, 2026
These four countries each have a single national medical regulator. The GMC sets the highest bar of the four — notably stricter than the equivalent nursing requirement in the same country
Unlike nursing, where requirements vary noticeably by province, doctor registration is anchored by a consistent national benchmark set by the Medical Council of Canada (MCC) that most provincial colleges — including Ontario’s CPSO — adopt directly:
As with nursing, each provincial college can set its own final standard, so this should be confirmed against the specific province of registration — but in practice the figures above hold consistently across most of the country.
This is the reverse of the nursing picture. There is no separate state-by-state English test for doctors: the national gateway, ECFMG Certification, requires every internationally-educated physician to pass OET Medicine — and only OET Medicine — to satisfy the federal communication-skills requirement before entering the residency Match or practising in any state:
Individual state medical boards may add further licensing requirements once a doctor is in practice, but the English-language gate itself is set once, nationally, by ECFMG.
Back to Menu ↩ Good doctors do not simply tell patients what to do. They explain the options, listen to the patient’s values and concerns,
Back to Menu ↩ Metaphors can tell us a lot about how people think. A new study, published in Acta Psychologica, uses metaphors to explore
Back to Menu ↩ In many countries, a large part of the healthcare workforce has trained overseas. In the UK for example, international medical graduates