The President,
BOG-MCI
New Delhi
Sub: Revised guidelines for undergraduate medical education w.r.t. Forensic Medicine
Respected Sir,
I am dismayed by the views put forward by undergraduate working group for Vision-2015. I feel the real cause of deteriorating standard of medical education is opening up of more & more private medical colleges. Earlier, a graduate passing out of govt. medical college was more skilled & competent in catering to the needs of community-health problems even as they were taught by old method of teaching i.e. black board. Even evaluation used to be done by asking essay-type questions. Even today, graduates coming out of govt medical colleges are more skilled & competent than their counterparts in private set up. The reason being in private medical colleges, the main motive & thrust is making profit disregarding the quality. Even they are constrained to keep faculty who turn up at the time of inspection only. This issue was not addressed to in the guidelines. The quantity is just not sufficient if the malady of retainership goes on unabated. The deteriorating quality is not because medical teachers cannot teach the students but due to insufficient number of actual working teachers. Moreover, the working force comprises junior teachers most of the time because only they are regular & rest are just retainers.
Another issue which is worth-mentioning is inadequate quantity/quality of clinical material/patient load/post-mortem examination in these colleges which obviously lead to sub-standard medical education. The students just become knowledgeable without even understanding what it should be used for & how?
Now-a days, a medical student while pursuing medicine is busy in mugging up MCQ’s for PG examination. So, he is not at all interested in acquiring skills for general practice . Hence the aetiology is mixed. The problem can be surmounted if the student knows what he is going to do after passing MBBS. Therefore, increasing the output of doctors is not going to solve the problem unless these burning issues are tackled. Think why a qualified doctor is not willing to serve in the rural sector? Why is there no dearth of good & competent doctors in a big city? Rather in some cities practicing doctors are more than required. Why is MCI not taking any initiative in eradicating quackery? This simple step may cause some doctors to work in villages- the reason being the MCI doctors are not able to compete with the non-MCI doctors as far as establishing rapport with patients is concerned ( MCI doctors mean doctors registered with MCI )
As per the proposal, the medical curriculum can be cut short by deleting the outdated material. In my opinion, even after deletion, the content remains too much voluminous because of recent advances in medicine. In other words, course material is much more than it used to be 20 years back. How can then we be justified in shortening the duration of MBBS.
1. The worst affected by the vision-2015 is Forensic Medicine. Is it justified & reasonable to fragment the subject to be taught by different specialties sane Forensic Experts. As such, some topics of forensic medicine are being touched upon by other departments, but the emphasis is on different aspects altogether. How do you expect the subject to be taught by other departments when they neither have expertise nor experience of undergoing the court-trial? Moreover, the strong emphasis put on teaching ethics to medical students reflects upon ignorance of the under-graduate working group. Since medical ethics, etiquettes & codes of professional conduct are being taught to the students in the subject of Forensic Medicine.
The standard of medical education is not going to be improved by:-
1. Increasing the number of private medical colleges
2. Increasing the number of seats
3. Deleting forensic medicine as an independent subject
4. Changing the methods of teaching without understanding the real cause of deterioration in medical education
I conclude by saying that if we really want to improve upon the worsening scenario of medical education, the following need to be done
1. Number & seats of government medical colleges should be increased
2. Faculty-requirement of all govt. medical colleges should be made good.
3. At the time of admission in the medical college, the student should be given the option of either becoming general practitioner or the specialist on the basis of the merit list.
4. Brain-drain should be discouraged by improving the living condition in the country
5. Quackery should be eradicated in Toto.
6. Post-mortem should be done only by Forensic Experts even though we have to increase the number of post-graduates in this branch. We can attract more & more students opting for this branch by some differential incentives.
7. The retirement age of faculty members should be reduced to 60 years because as the age increases, some teachers show reluctance to interact with students. In our branch, senior people don’t want to do post-mortem examination too.
Yours sincerely,
Dr.R.K.bansal
Associate Professor
Department of Forensic Medicine & Toxicology
SGT Medical College, Budhera, Gurgaon
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