Criminal Background Checks for Entering Medical Students

I have never given this much thought, but it should likely come as no surprise that criminal background checks are being used prior to medical school matriculation. It seems like background checks are employed in many other fields and professions so why should medicine be entirely immune to the trend?


I am still not clear on the burden of the problem with respect to 'criminals' applying to medical school. Here is a recent review article on the topic in Academic Medicine.


113 medical schools use a criminal background check; 92 schools use the AAMC-facilitated process, and 21 schools use an independent process. Only a small number of acceptances have been reconsidered based on the results of criminal background checks. For classes entering medical school between 2008 and 2010, 58,108 out of 127,242 applicants were accepted by at least one medical school. AAMC-facilitated criminal background checks were conducted on 24,085 of these accepted applicants. Only 3% of these applicants did not matriculate for a combination of reasons, including withdrawals, deferments, and rescinded offers of acceptance.  Lacking is detailed information on the very small number of rescinded offers of acceptance.


I am not sure how much of an impact this will have, but I suspect that the criminal background check will become routine nevertheless.