Hyderabad: MCI roadblock for state run medical colleges to offer more seats

Hyderabad: Many state-run institutes have hit the MCI roadblock to offer increased seats for PG courses, or to start speciality courses. The reason for denial of MCI approval is lack of infrastructure and manpower in most of the state run medical colleges.

There are more private medical colleges which have been denied permission by MCI regarding their approval on new speciality medical courses or increase in seats , on the same premise.

As a major consequence of MCI’s decision is the denial of approval to Gandhi Medical College to offer DM (Endocrinology) course in 2016-17. The council’s PG medical education committee (PMEC) took a decision in a meeting citing mostly deficiencies in manpower.

Other colleges denied permission includes prominent names like Osmania Medical College and Kakatiya Medical College (KMC). They were denied permission to increase students intake for MS (orthopaedics) and MS (general surgery) courses respectively for 2016-17. PMEC noted many infrastructure and manpower issues with both the colleges.

Speaking about the state of medical institutions, Dr G Srinivas, president, Telangana Junior Doctors' Association, said to TOI that, "This (lack of permissions) is not surprising as the MCI's PMEC decision was on expected lines. After the state's bifurcation, no serious effort was made by the Telangana government either to recruit medical faculty or to upgrade existing infrastructure in government medical colleges."

TOI in its report also implies that the PMEC’s assessment report for MD (pathology) and MD (community medicine) courses run by Kakatiya Medical College (KMC) throws some interesting facts. For example, KMC’s application to offer more seats for MD (community medicine) is not even supported with the bare minimum faculty requirement. It has not appointed an epidemiologist-cum-assistant professor and a statistician-cum-lecturer to seek permission for the increased intake. In addition, there are 10 deficiencies noted including, no research publish and decrease in workload.

When these deficiencies were brought to the notice of Dr M Ramani, director of medical education (DME), she sought to defend the state government's role saying that faculty-related deficiencies in state-run medical colleges could not be rectified due to delay in repatriation process. "Recruitment of new faculty is linked to repatriation, which is still under way," she said to TOI. Speaking about the lack of adequate infrastructure, she added that all such shortcomings would be dealt with in the next two to three months as the state government had released enough funds recently.