4-year rural medicine degree to be initiated
POSTED February 7, 2010 - 15:41 | POSTED BY Jyoti Pal
Last edited by Harpreet Bhagrath on February 7, 2010 - 15:52
The joint suggestion of the MCI and the Health and Family Welfare Ministry received an overwhelming consensus at the two-day workshop of experts at the national capital Delhi.
Close to 250 experts, including vice-chancellors and deans of medical colleges and directors of medical education, attended the workshop.
Paucity of doctors in rural areas addressed
The plan to introduce a four-year-medical degree in rural medicine was brought up due to the paucity of doctors in rural areas. Presently, most of the MBBS doctors are unwilling to serve in India's most far flung and inaccessible areas.
Highlighting the necessity of the new course, health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said, "We have to reduce dependency on quacks by increasing availability of trained doctors. We are facing 50% vacancy in medical colleges in rural India."
The new degree, modeled on China's `barefoot doctors', may be termed as Bachelor of Rural Health Care (BRHC) instead of the initial proposed nomenclature of Bachelor of Rural Medicine and Surgery (BRMS).
MCI president Dr Ketan Desai said, "The idea of BRMS is to get students from rural areas willing to work in their hometowns rather than try getting doctors who don't want to live or work in villages.”
“BRMS will not replace but supplement and strengthen the current medical education system. The idea is to produce medical graduates who will cater to the specific health needs of rural India," added Dr. Desai.
The course
The MCI has already approved the proposed curriculum of BRMS. The students who enroll for the course would be trained as surgeons for hernia, abdominal pain and appendicitis.
Additionally such doctors would go through courses in obstetrics, gynecology, pediatrics, orthopedics, community medicine, forensic medicine, family medicine, pharmacology, anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathology, and microbiology. Overall, the course will lay emphasis on national health programs.
To be initiated on a pilot basis in a few government institutions, the course, if successful, would be extended to the private sector as well.
Dr. Desai noted that a mechanism would be built to upgrade the curriculum of BRMS from time to time to make it “timely and relevant.”
BRMS, which will support the existing “urban-centric” model of medical education, has to be now approved by the Central Health Council and then ratified and implemented by the States, health being a State subject.
