MBBS in Azerbaijan Medical University

Nariman Narimanov Azerbaijan Medical University – a name that most Indian MBBS consultancies tend to skirt around and never mention fully when promoting their cheap MBBS programmes.

Azerbaijan Medical University is not the new type of medical institution offering courses with an added English track bolted onto a general university. This is a dedicated medical faculty that has been operating in this format for the last almost one hundred years.

Established in 1930 as a separate institution within the framework of Soviet expansion of specialized education in the South Caucasus, AMU teaches nothing but medicine for the whole of its century-long existence.

That said, there is no need to use the words "medical faculty" in order to show the difference in age and format of AMU – the sheer number of students it currently educates from such countries as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran and others, in parallel Azerbaijani and English-medium courses, does speak for itself.

AMU started its English-medium international program specifically for foreign students in around 2015. Following the independence of Azerbaijan in 1991, AMU went through restructuring and modernization, while keeping its governmental status and remaining the primary medical school in the country.

As opposed to numerous younger regional competitors, which went through changing hands or affiliations more than once during the same period of time, AMU retained its stability of both.

A natural question would be what kind of reason would a student have to pay more or less USD 6,500 per academic year for his/her studies in AMU, given that Nakhchivan State University, located only several hundred kilometres away, is charging half that amount.

The answer lies, probably, in Baku. AMU is situated in the capital of the country, a city with a population over 2 million, which has its metro, working ride-hailing apps, an international airport with direct flights to Istanbul, Dubai, Moscow and London, as well as a sufficient number of clinical hospitals in order to allow for real rotations of students rather than a few affiliated wards.

Choosing AMU, a student pays for the infrastructure and hospital volumes, as much as for education itself. If one needs to study in a recognized city environment for six years, he or she has to pay a premium for that.

It is also easier to get recognition of the degree from AMU, due to its age. The university is included into the list of World Directory of Medical Schools (WDOMS) published by WHO and used for evaluating foreign medical education by India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and other countries' authorities.

AMU is listed in ECFMG database, meaning that the eligible graduates can go for ECFMG Certification and USMLE pathway for obtaining US residency. This path is not available for several younger Central Asian and Caucasus medical schools.

None of that implies the automatic recognition by the specific Indian medical board. NMC eligibility still depends on the regulations existing at the time of graduation, and it applies to AMU as much as to any other foreign medical university.

The education in AMU for international students is conducted in English only, with a minor module of learning Azerbaijani language in the first year of studies. It aims to help a student to communicate with patients during the clinical years, rather than changing the language of instruction.

The 6-year MD programme is based on the standard Soviet structure: two years of pre-clinical sciences, two years of para-clinical and diagnostic disciplines and two years of full clinical rotations in Baku affiliated hospitals.

The sixth year is devoted to supervised clinical practice. Due to the almost century-long experience of AMU, its clinical rotations take place in several hospitals in the city rather than in one or two only.

That means the access to greater variety of medical fields and higher patient volumes than a newly established program allows for.

It will cost more than living in the smaller Azerbaijani towns, and that is a fact to be mentioned openly, rather than avoided. One would expect to pay around USD 350-500 per month for rent, food, transportation and other incidentals in Baku, compared with about USD 200-350 in Nakhchivan.

University hostels will cost around USD 100 per month, while privately rented apartments in good locations are estimated to cost USD 150-250 per month. Cost of a local meal is between USD 3 and 7.

Baku Metro, along with Bolt and Uber, helps to keep the transportation expenses at the level of USD 20-40 a month, even for students far from the campus.

alal food is not a particular issue here, as the Azerbaijani cuisine is inherently halal, while Pakistani, Indian, Turkish and Arabic restaurants work all over the city, along with supermarkets selling familiar food products.

None of that makes AMU the cheapest route into the medical education. And it should not be promoted as that. Students who are looking to optimize the cost of education as much as possible are often better off going to Nakhchivan or some of the Central Asian medical universities.

Instead, AMU offers a near-100-year old medical faculty, hospital rotations spread over real urban clinical network and a city with working metro, international airport and social life, which does not depend entirely on the schedule of university.

For a student who wants both a recognized and old medical faculty and a real city to live in for six years, rather than a small regional town, AMU is one of the few institutions in this price category to satisfy both requirements.