*Updated April 2024 to reflect the new medical clearance requirements.

So you just passed the Oral Assessment and signed your conditional offer of employment. Congrats, you did it! You’re Hired!!! Oh wait….not so fast.

Make no mistake, passing the Oral Assessment means you have cleared more hurdles than the vast majority of candidates that applied for the same position. Of the 3 people I have spoken to that made it as far as taking the OA, I am the only one that has passed. That means of 6 people I know that applied for the Medical Provider job around the same time as me, I am the only one that made it this far. It is certainly a cause for celebration, but there is still a lot of work (and waiting) to be done before you are sitting in orientation.

Once you pass the Oral Assessment, the State Department will send you a bucket load of information and details about the next steps in the process. Those being Medical and Security Clearances. In this post I will detail the Medical Clearance process. Hopefully, if you made it this far, you’ve already looked into this part of the hiring process a bit. Technically, they do give you a conditional job offer, but it is dependent on your passing all these clearances and being pulled off The Register. It’s not uncommon for folks to wait a year or two longer from this point to being hired.

To be hired for a job with the Foreign Service, you need to be cleared from a medical standpoint to be available at a minimum to serve in any of the regional medevac centers in the world (think London, Bangkok, Singapore, Pretoria, etc). Specific to being a Medical Provider, you have to be able to meet this requirement AND be able to serve in at least one high hardship post upon hire. The old “Worldwide Available” system doesn’t exist anymore for new hires, but for individuals being hired to fill medical jobs, the barrier to entry remains higher.

What this all means is you (and your family) get a physical done by your primary healthcare provider and have some basic blood work drawn. Your provider will fill out the medical paperwork the State Department sent you to give to them, and once you have all the lab results and signed physical, you send it all back to MED at the State Department via email for evaluation. After a period of time, you will be notified of your medical clearances status via email and if there are any restrictions for you or your loved ones. A process that used to be pretty scary when certain condition would prevent you from being hired, what MED is really looking for now, is if your condition needs a lot of management, or can it be handled easily, even in Sub-Saharan Africa where the nearest CT machine is a plane ride away.

The Medical Clearance process is typically one of the faster steps in the whole process for most people. Like all things in the Foreign Service, it will depend on your personal medical issues, but assuming there is nothing glaring that stands out, this usually just takes a month or two. As I mentioned above, my family and I got our clearances about two weeks after sending all of our information in. Surprisingly fast (maybe they saw I too was applying for a MED job, and gave me the sweetheart treatment 😉 ). If you have a more serious history or issues like being a breast cancer survivor, MED might request more lab work, imaging, or input from your oncologist to testify that you are in total remission and need nothing more than your routine annual exams. This of course, will obviously make the process a bit longer, but of all the cogs in the wheel, MED seems to spin the fastest.

Hopefully this was helpful to you. In the next post, I will go over Security Clearances, the real purgatory of the hiring process.