MCI aims to bring back 5000 NRI doctors in 5 years

Amendments in the Medical Council of India (MCI) regulations will open the floodgates for hundreds of non-resident Indian (NRI) doctors to come back to their roots. MCI has eased the cross-over rules and has set a target of bringing back 5,000 Indian doctors, including teachers, settled in US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

MCI has removed the main bottleneck by recognising the postgraduation and other degrees of these specific countries where health facilities are supposedly best in the world and the education was done in English medium. They have the choice of coming back to teach in a private or government college as well as work in a private or government hospital. Also, they can set up their own medical colleges and hospitals. Indian doctors in these countries are the richest segment even among NRIs.

Apart from accepting foreign degrees, the MCI has made special provision so that foreign experience is also counted. For example, if there is a professor of medicine in a US university, with the required number of years of experience to become one in India, he can be hired as a professor by any medical college in India. This will bring about a huge change not only in the cities but also in the countryside, if the doctors returning home really go deeper into their roots. Besides, MCI also sees the possibility of groups of NRI doctors coming back and pooling in their resources to build hospitals and medical colleges.

More weightage in postgraduate entrance exams to doctors completing rural service

An additional weightage of 10 per cent for each year of rural service will be given to doctors applying for post-graduate entrance examinations from the next academic year.

Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said this weightage will be subject to a maximum of 30 per cent for three years, though a doctor could serve in rural areas for as many years as he chose to after completing the internship .

Similarly, 50 per cent of seats in post-graduate diploma courses have also been reserved for medical officers in government service who have served for at least three years in inaccessible areas.

“This will be a major incentive for doctors and para-medical staff to serve in the rural areas,” Mr. Azad said.

In order to facilitate the increase in the number of medical specialists, the Government has also decided to increase the enrolment of post-graduate students. The existing 1:1 ratio will be enhanced in broad specialities for professor and in super specialities to 1:2.

The rise in the number of post-graduate doctors will automatically increase the number of teachers due to the multiplier effect. Thus, without substantive additional resource and infrastructure requirement, the number of post-graduate specialists would dramatically increase annually by almost 5,000 from the existing 13,000.

While this move will certainly ensure influx of doctors in rural areas, I am worried about the 30% marks. Seems to be a real dangling carrot which can cause havoc to merit lists. Also I hate to see the sight of doctors spending their rural postings solving MCQs instead of learning new things and providing necessary service. Or am I being far too pessimistic?

Rs 12.6 crore aid to MUHS from Planning Commission

The Pune regional centre of the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences (MUHS) has been allotted Rs 3 crore of the total Rs 12.6 crore financial aide extended by the Planning Commission of India to the Nashik-based state health university for strengthening infrastructure and training facilities.

Maharashtra has 41 medical colleges and has 4,460 students graduating each year the highest in country. The number of colleges rose from 12 in 1980 to 41 by the end of 2008. A shortage of teachers has reflected on the number of quality doctors passing out of colleges. There is a need for quality training of teachers as well as continuing medical education and continuing professional development (CME/CPD) for medical teachers.

This is the first ever instance of the MUHS receiving an aide of such major proportion from a central agency. The funds are to be routed through the state department for medical education, which issued a government resolution (GR) on August 29 declaring the distribution of the aide to MUHS, Nashik headquarters and Pune regional centre.

Speaking to TOI , MUHS vice-chancellor Mrudula Phadke said,

The funds allotted to the Pune regional centre will be utilised for establishing a state-of-the-art training institution for medical professionals engaged in teaching health science courses.

The idea is to provide medical teachers’ training at four different levels viz. junior, intermediaries, middle and senior-level doctors in different aspects. For instance, few doctors knew about an infectious disease like swine flu until a few months back. We want to ensure that our doctors get an update on outbreak of diseases, to be prepared for tackling such health eventualities.”

The MUHS teachers training institute, which is the only facility of its kind in the state, was established on March 27, 2007, at the Aundh Chest Hospital building. However, the health varsity had sought funds for strengthening and creating a state-of-the-art training facility for medical teachers.

Dr Phadke said

The junior-level training had focus on factors like communication with patients, medical ethics and good medical practices, among others; the intermediary and middle-level training would be focussed on continuing medical education and continuing professional development (CME/CPD) and skill enhancement. The CME/CPD and skill enhancement training is where the update on emerging diseases is to be covered.

The senior-level training would mostly involve deans and professors from various government medical colleges and hospitals and would focus on factors such as leadership, management and administration.

The Nashik unit will get Rs 5 crore for proposed new buildings and basic infrastructure while Rs 1 crore each will go setting up video-conferencing; medical library; and consortium of journals facility and Rs 1.6 crore for procurement of new equipment.

But already a row seems to be brewing over the allocation of funds. Wait and watch what happens next.

MCI approved degree mandatory for admission to superspeciality courses

In an important judgement, the Bombay High Court on Monday held that only the students who have MD or MS degree from a college recognized by Medical Council Of India (MCI) can be admitted to post-graduate ‘Doctor of Medicine (super-speciality) courses.

Bhavin Pujara, a doctor, had filed a petition in the High Court challenging merit list of candidates selected for super-speciality course in 2008. He contended that many candidates in the list did not have MD or MS degree from MCI-recognized colleges.

Directorate of Medical Education and Research relaxed the rule in 2008 by allowing candidates from non-recognized colleges, he said.

A Division Bench, led by Justice D K Deshmukh, held that in future, candidates for the super-speciality course must have degree from a college recognized by MCI, said petitioner’s lawyer Mukesh Vashi.

Dr Mukund Bajaj is fortunate but he is perhaps the last candidate to get admission to a super-speciality course without having a post-graduate degree recognised by the Medical Council of India (MCI). Bajaj retained his seat at Grant Medical College because the Bombay High Court did not feel it fit to take away his seat after he had completed a year in the course. Also, the MCI had said that the seat could not be given to any other candidate after the admissions were completed.

Multiple choice questions: the right choice?

Most high stakes entrance exams are conducted on the basis of results of multiple choice questions (MCQ). In a study published by the Economic and Political Weekly, Shobhit Mahajan and Pramod Shrivastava reveal that a candidate’s performance is governed chiefly by chance.

Real-life samples from an entrance examination, which had 57,000 applicants attempting two papers of 100 marks each were taken. Since the number of applicants was so large, there were instances when more than one person got the same score and rank. Says Mahajan: “We chose one of these question papers (which had 100 questions) and manufactured 10 other question papers created by randomly picking 50 questions from the 100 questions. As a result, we had 11 question papers for each student – the original paper and 10 fictitious ones. Since we had prepared the fictitious papers from the original paper, the scores of each student in each of the 10 fictitious papers were known. When we ranked them again, we took one rank, say 1,000. Now we took the 162 students who ranked 1,000 in the original exam. The rank 1,000 was chosen because in most exams, 1,000 or 1,500 is the usual cut-off rank. We took their marks in the 11 papers that we now had with us. And what we found was that the candidate who ranked 1,000 in the real exam was equally likely to have got a rank of say 650 or 1,400.”

What this study essentially says is that MCQs have a huge sampling error. It is an inherent limitation of this assessment tool. Agreed, that it is practical and feasible to use MCQs when the number of students is so low. But, the predictive validity of MCQs is pretty low. Does a student who scored cent percent in a MCQ test have any traits to be a competent doctor? Does this tool even test those qualities? A judicious mix of assessment tools needs to be used in selection examinations.

Technorati Tags Medical Education, Medical Education in India

The cost of producing a doctor in India

This report says that over the last three years, the tuition fees paid by an aspiring doctor in India have almost tripled.

Across India, while fees in private unaided medical colleges are still way below Rs 3 lakh, the Nagpur-based NKP Salve institute charges Rs 4.75 lakh, the highest in the country. Karnataka may have the largest pool of medical seats in India but Maharashtra by far charges the highest fees.

The annual cost of an MBBS course in a private college in Maharashtra ranges from Rs 4.75 lakh at NKP Salve to Rs 1.68 lakh at ACPM, Dhule, with the bulk of the colleges — most of them run by politicians — charging in the range of Rs 2.5-3 lakh. The annual fees of the only private college within Mumbai, K.J. Somaiya,went up from Rs 1.89 lakh to a whopping Rs 3.72 lakh between 2003 and 2006.

The main reason for this state of affairs is that the government committee responsible for regulating fees in the state has been approving hikes proposed by the managements of these colleges every year. The question that we need to ask is, when students from these colleges finally reach society what will prevent them from extracting their pound of flesh from their patients. Whither the spirit of service in their minds when they have themselves been victim of these money-minting schemes.

Welcome to the Med-Ed Blog!

Medical education has traditionally been one of the most neglected areas in medicine. Thankfully, today things are changing and awareness of its importance is increasing. Teaching technology has acquired scientific dimensions. The profession of being a medical educator has gained respectability and credibility. But there is still a long way to go.

Through the medium of this blog, let us join hands to speak the common language of walking together– in a common quest to make medical education better and more fulfilling- for the students and for the teachers.

Technorati Tags Medical Education