State of Medical Education In India - 3 reports

SC says state of medical colleges rotten, imposes Rs 5 cr fine

New Delhi: Terming the state of medical colleges in the country as "rotten", the Supreme Court today imposed a penalty of Rs 5 crore on an Odisha-based private medical college for raising the number of seats from 100 to 150 in an academic year and "playing with the future of students".

"Costs of Rs 5 crores are imposed on Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS) for playing with the future of its students and the mess that it has created for them. The amount will be deposited by KIMS in the Registry of this Court within six weeks from today.

"The amount of Rs 5 crores deposited towards costs shall not be recovered in any manner from any student or adjusted against the fees or provision of facilities for students of any present or subsequent batches," a bench comprising Justices M B Lokur and N V Ramana said.

The bench, however, protected the students who were admitted in the year 2015-16 in the courses run by the medical college administration.

"The admission granted to the 50 students pursuant to the order of the High Court dated September 25, 2015 and the provisional permission granted by the central government only on September 28, 2015 shall not be disturbed.

"How the students will complete their course of studies without putting undue pressure on them is entirely for MCI and KIMS and other concerned authorities to decide," it said.

The top court also restrained KIMS from increasing the intake of students from 100 to 150 for the MBBS course for the academic year 2016-17 and 2017-2018.

The order came on an appeal filed by MCI challenging the Orissa High Court's verdict which had permitted KIMS to admit additional 50 students in academic year 2015-16.

The private medical college had moved the High Court, challenging MCI's order disallowing admission in MBBS and BDS streams citing lack of adequate infrastructure.

Doctors break silence on rot in India's medical sector

New Delhi, May 8: There is a huge nexus among corporate hospitals, pharma companies and doctors who engage in exploitative practices called 'target system' and 'cuts' with the motive of earning profits, claims a book by doctors, who broke their silence on rampant malpractices.

In a chilling narrative, the book 'Dissenting Diagnosis' says 'packages' offered by multispeciality corporate hospitals, incorporating a range of tests under 'master checkup', not only drains an individual of his hard-earned money but the collected samples go down the 'sink' as well.

The book launched last week lays bare the rot in the medical sector as it gives first person accounts of patients, doctors and pathologists from across the country.

In the book, a pathologist, who did not want to be named, explains that sink tests essentially means samples collected from patients are just thrown into the wash basin without testing as doctors prescribe such tests, which by mutual understanding, are "not actually carried out" by the pathologist.

Dr Arun Gadre and Dr Abhay Shukla, the authors of the book, have also extensively documented other exploitative practices such as the 'target system', the concept of 'cuts' and how corporate hospitals work like industries with the sole motive of the 'shareholders' being "more and more profit".

Gadre and Shukla write how a senior super-specialist urologist had to leave a corporate hospital because its young MBBS CEO castigated him for not performing a particular operation for removal of a kidney stone where there was no need for any such procedure.

"These hospitals run on a perverted concept. Their only purpose is to satisfy the interests of their shareholders. The more profit the better. They go on prescribing needless investigations and surgeries," Gadre says.

Shukla says a person had to sell his apartment after a major corporate hospital came up with a bill of an astounding Rs 42 lakh for the treatment of his wife. "The actual expenditure cannot possibly even come close to this."

Both the authors, associated with Pune-based SATHI which specialises in policy advocacy related to health care, underline the need for a radical "restructuring" of the Medical Council of India (MCI), which they say has turned a blind eye to the systemic assualt on ethics in the medical profession.

8 out of 10 doctors say Indian medical education system is in doldrums

New Delhi: Eight out of ten doctors polled have said that the medical education system in India needs to become more professional and less fraudulent.

Out of a total of 1760 doctors polled, a whopping 84.6 percent of them agreed that the current system of medical education is flawed and discourages young minds. Only 13.6 percent described it as encouraging, while 1.7 percent stood divided.

Dr. Sumer Sethi, Director, DAMS, said, "You cannot keep training younger generation using training methodology made decades before they were born.

World has changed in the internet era and our medical schools still are following the classical approach and are not utilizing the connectivity or technology available. Promoting inquisitiveness and research is another area where the medical educators should take the lead."

The results clearly point out that there is a huge dissatisfaction amongst the medical community regarding the current education system that needs radical changes.

Safdarjung Hospital Professor, Dr. Chintamani, said the current medical education system can be described in two phrases, i.e confusing and sans vision.

"Since the time students starts preparing for PMT till they becomes a specialist or a super specialist they are in a blind rat race. And it doesn't matter who the winner or loser is because everyone ends up being a rat. The whole system is exam oriented, either at the exit or at the entry. Where is the joy of studying medicine in that? Moreover this does not prepare the students to face the real world. The whole system is flawed from the beginning and needs to be changed," he added.

Commenting on this, Nipun Goyal, Co-founder Curofy said, "Indian Medical Education System is disfunctioning and that's an open secret. The poll results showed us the growing discontent in medical community regarding it. Radical overhauling of the system is the need of the hour."