Setting up govt. medical colleges without long-term plan will not help, says KGMCTA

The Kerala Government Medical College Teachers Association (KGMCTA) has said that setting up government medical colleges in districts without conceiving a long-term strategy and planning for their functioning will destroy the medical education sector in the State.

T. Rosenara Begum and C.S. Aravind, KGMCTA president and general secretary respectively, told the media here on Thursday that the government had not bothered to create the required posts of doctors in most medical colleges that were established in recent times. To compensate for this, doctors were being temporarily transferred to these places from other institutions ahead of the visit by the National Medical Commission (NMC). This was affecting the functioning of the already existing medical colleges. The new medical colleges were not getting permanent staff too.

The KGMCTA leaders also alleged that efforts were being made to appoint teachers without medical degrees in medical colleges utilising the NMC’s permission to take in non-medical graduates with doctorate degrees in the absence of medical graduates. Recently, the Kerala Public Service Commission deferred a qualifying examination for appointment to the departments of Biochemistry and Microbiology even though a large number of qualified candidates had applied for the job. They alleged that efforts were being made to change the qualification criteria for these posts.

Ms. Begum also highlighted the low pay package for entry-level posts in medical colleges. She said that many people were reluctant to take up government jobs because of this, and that many others had quit their jobs months after joining the service. This was affecting patients’ treatment, classes for medical students and the approval for super-speciality courses, she said.

State meet

The KGMCTA is holding its State conference at the Government Medical College, Kozhikode, on October 25. M.K. Raghavan, Kozhikode MP, will open the conference. Sessions on ‘Artificial Intelligence and the health sector’ and the ‘Need for enforcing protocols in the surgical sector’ will be held along with this.