Identify gaps in medical education and come up with suggestions, Minister tells officials

Health Minister urges officials to fill vacant medical college posts, improve standards, and focus on quality healthcare and education.

Health, Family Welfare and Medical Education Minister Y. Satya Kumar Yadav has instructed the officials concerned to expedite the process of filling vacant posts of professors, associate professors and assistant professors in government medical colleges.

In a review meet held on Wednesday, the Minister asked officials to lay focus on increasing the standards in the medical education and attendance percentage of both teachers and students.

There are 40 medical colleges in the State in government and private sectors, with an annual MBBS intake of around 6,500 students and around 3,000 PG admissions in various clinical and non-clinical branches.

He said the aim of the meeting is to know the status of medical education in the State, the limitations and the ways and means of improving its quality so that the medical graduates and post-graduates passing out have a brand value.

He said quality healthcare is a serious subject and it makes the quality of medical education that much more important. “A medical graduate or a post-graduate deals with the lives of the people and it is vastly different from handling accounts or undertaking an engineering assignment. Since the stakes are very high while handling patients, we can’t afford poor quality,” the Minister added.

To this end, he asked 17 questions to the principals of colleges. Some of them include: where does the State stand in terms of medical education in South India and the country, how is it rated on a scale of 10, the best-performing colleges, its ranking in the country, the immediate five steps needed to be taken to improve the quality of medical education, among others.

He said that efforts should be made to achieve the National Institutional Ranking Framework-NIRF and advised the principals to send research-related articles to international journals and take steps to strengthen the research department.