UCLA IMG Program

UCLA IMG Program

The UCLA International Medical Graduate (IMG) Program is a non-profit educational program for Hispanic International Medical Graduates who are residing in the US legally. Housed in the Dept of Family Medicine of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles, California the IMG Program was created to train immmigrant physicians who could address the linguistic and cultural barriers to care faced by California's larged underserved Hispanic population.

The term international medical graduate, or IMG, is used to describe a physician who has graduated from a medical school outside of the U.S. or Canada. One in every four of the over 900,000 practicing physicians in the United States is an IMG. Generally, the medical school of graduation is one listed in the International Medical Education Directory (IMED) as accredited by the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research or the World Health Organization. This has been the subject of many medical articles because many of these doctors come from developing countries, and as such, some consider this a "brain drain".