A board certified physician practicing in another state accepted employment at a reputable California health care facility and applied for licensure in California. After several months of delays, a Medical Board representative was unwilling to accept the doctor’s clinical experience from a reputable European institution approved by the Medical Board. Ironically, the institution has a longer history than the State of California.
We helped the physician quickly obtain a California license by redirecting the Medical Board towards licensing by reciprocity with another state in which our client is licensed.
In licensing credentials cases, it is critical to read the actual licensing requirements in the Business and Professions Code and California Code of Regulations rather than relying on an interpretation of the law by an agency representative. For example in this case, an agency representative was focused on hours of clinical experience, but the law speaks of “weeks.” The law obviously anticipated that not all clinical programs across the world would work on uniform eight-hour days.