Training doctors or businessmen?
Vatsala Vedantam
Of the hundreds of medical colleges in the country, a mere 25 can truly claim to be institutions of excellence. The casual manner in which the so called regulators of healthcare/medical education have gone about recognising and even approving these colleges has resulted in mediocre teaching and learning facilities.
Admissions to UG and PG courses have been shockingly engineered through middlemen and education brokers, ignoring all accepted norms. Such blatant violation of rules and regulations may have resulted in churning out thousands of sub-standard doctors in the country.
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Medical education in India is a fragmented process, largely driven by social and financial requirements of the students. Many teenagers, influenced by parental and peer pressures, opt for a career in medicine because it is impressive, influential and lucrative. If the same advantages can be reaped by a career in the civil services, they even opt for the the IAS examination after qualifying to be a doctor. Just as qualified engineers opt for management studies, we find medical students swapping their courses and careers thereby wasting the education they received in a medical college, while at the same time, depriving society of a committed physician.
Enormous waste
Regulatory bodies like the MCI should have taken serious note of this enormous wastage, and introduced reforms like raising the minimum age for medical college admissions, as is practiced in the US where a basic four-year degree is mandatory to study medicine which ensures more maturity in young aspiring doctors. Why, their entrance tests for medical colleges also take note of a student’s aptitude for social service, in addition to her ability to complete the course successfully.
On the contrary, medical education in several states in this country is driven by monetary considerations for the trustees of those colleges. Instead of training their students to become caring physicians, such colleges encourage them to convert their professions into money making enterprises by levying exorbitant capitation fees at the time of admission which they are covertly encouraged to recover from their patients in the course of their future careers as doctors. When regulatory bodies fail to correct these discrepancies, they have no right to continue as such. The Supreme Court’s directive is the appropriate answer to these fundamental issues.
. The fees people pay for school seems to be surreal. I know education had long ago become a business; but considering the fact that in several schools the teachers do not teach as the system has been set up in a way that all students take tuition outside the classes.