Objective: The Teaching for Learning and Collaboration (TLC) Program is a teaching-skills program focusing on methods to improve student learning. This program was adopted to address the professional and personal challenges faced by International Medical Graduates (IMGs) completing a fellowship in psychosomatic medicine.
Method: The authors conducted a literature review on the educational challenges encountered by IMGs. Based on this review, an adapted TLC Program was piloted on four IMG fellows who completed a psychosomatic medicine fellowship between 2008 and 2011.
Results: Teachers using the adapted TLC Program reported the following as being significant in the IMG training process: a safe educational environment; having an extended period of time for assessment and fellow adjustment; and more direct, rather than "diplomatic," feedback.
Conclusions: Although piloted in a psychosomatic medicine fellowship, the TLC program is intended to be generalizable to other medical training settings. Further evaluation of the effectiveness of this approach for IMGs is required.