AMARAVATI: About 1,200 professors, associate and assistant professors in government medical colleges were transferred online late on Wednesday. "The transfers were done without giving scope for any manual intervention. There are no complaints as everyone has been given a fair chance to give their options through the portal and same criterion has been applied to all without any bias," said principal secretary (health-medical education) Muddada Ravi Chandra.
However, the directorate of medical education (DME) seems to have failed to take a few sensitive issues into consideration before designing the transfer scheme.
Sources said that senior professors who were shifted to faraway places may quit service. Similarly, a good number of associate and assistant professors in super specialty wings are also planning to quit as they have already made decent revenues from private practice. Although, there is a ban on private practice of government doctors, these doctors established their own hospitals with strong network as majority of them have been working in their home towns for over a decade without any transfer.
"Shifting long serving medical professionals to other locations is a right move to make them dedicate their time to public healthcare in view of the hefty salaries being paid by the government. However, the government should have carefully handled the issue to avoid suffering of healthcare and teaching services in the medical colleges," said a retired principal of a medical college. Super specialty wings are likely to suffer the most as senior professors were moved to colleges without DM seats. For instance, three medical colleges, Vizag, Guntur and Tirupati, have DM seats in neurology. While a senior professor from Vizag was shifted to Kakinada, another senior professor was shifted to Vijayawada.
Interestingly, there were no DM seats in Kakinada college and Vijayawada college. In fact, the absence of professors might also result in AP losing the seats during the next academic year as it was not so easy to find faculty for super specialty streams. Similar is the case of super specialty departments such as cardiology, cardiothoracic surgery, nephrology and urology.
Sources said that an associate professor in neurosurgery Government Medical College (GMC), Guntur, Bhavanam Hanuma Srinivasa Reddy, who shot to fame by performing a critical surgery while showing the patient Bahubali movie, had submitted his resignation to the post following the transfers move.
"The essence of Directorate of Medical Education (DME) is to take care of teaching hospitals. It is not just to manage health care and provide services to patients but to train and teach upcoming doctors. We are going to seriously impacted," said a student in a super specialty stream.
