An assessment of 246 colleges by the Undergraduate Medical Education Board (UGMEB) of the National Medical Commission (NMC), found that no medical college had adequate faculty members or senior residents, and all colleges failed to meet the 50% attendance requirement.
The assessment was made during the 2022-23 academic year.
Recently, the NMC had introduced a monetary penalty of ₹1 crore, for medical colleges that fail to adhere to norms and standards set by the Commission. However, medical education experts are now asking why permission was granted by the NMC to all these colleges in the first place.
“Maintaining quality of medical education is important for safeguarding health of common people. Indiscriminately opening new colleges just for political purposes won’t help,” said Ravi Wankhedkar, IMA’s former president.
Saying that non-adherence to standards is “equivalent to cheating medical students and the public”, another expert asked on social media how it is noticed that teachers are not available in the college after it is opened. “How can these colleges be given the green signal to open in the first place?”, the expert questioned.
Recently, the NMC had said that none of the institutes inspected by it had students visiting the emergency department regularly. “We found out that no student goes to the emergency medicine department regularly because there is no one in the department to interact with them other than the casualty medical officer. Posting in the emergency medicine department is supposed to be a break period for the students,” the NMC told the Associations of Emergency Physicians of India (AEPI) in a letter, a copy of which is available with The Hindu.
The NMC also informed the AEPI that while 134 colleges had emergency medicine departments “on paper”, the ground reality was different.
The NMC said this while replying to the AEPI, which was concerned about the exclusion of ‘Emergency Medicine’ studies from the recently updated norms prescribed by NMC for new medical colleges. The AEPI had approached the NMC for immediate redressal.
