In contravention to norms of the National Medical Commission (NMC), many government medical colleges (GMC) in Telangana have allotted MSc and MSc PhD faculty as internal and external examiners for the MBBS practical examinations conducted in the colleges under the Kaloji Narayana Rao University of Health Sciences (KNRUHS), stated a The New Indian Express report.
As per the NMC norms, the examiners for the internal and external practical MBBS examinations must have at least four years of teaching experience after a postgraduate degree following MBBS. Therefore, faculty members who have only completed an MSc or MSc PhD are not eligible.
The university had also issued the same directions in this regard to the colleges. However, owing to a lack of qualified members in various colleges across the state, many MSc faculty have been allotted for the MBBS practical exams, according to sources.
An assistant professor at the Suryapet Government Medical College told The New Indian Express, “The norms, changed a few years ago, disallows MSc faculty from being examiners. However, the practice continues in the government medical colleges. It needs to be corrected and only the eligible faculty should be deployed as examiners.”
Irregular recruitment
While every GMC in the state has been reeling from a shortage in staff, the issue is more deep-rooted than that. Doctors said that most of the recruitment in the GMCs was on a contract basis for a year, while the recruitment of regular teaching staff was not done regularly.
Elaborating on the issue, a doctor from Nalgonda GMC explained, "New government medical colleges are coming up in the state without the required infrastructure, teaching faculty and staff. Some colleges have only one or two teaching staff members. Meanwhile, the government is reluctant to fill vacancies regularly due to lack of funding. Contractual hiring fails to address the issue of understaffed GMCs, as these staff members serve for only one year and many are hesitant to join due to various restrictions, including limitations on private practice and lack of travel allowances for remote postings. Moreover, the significant disparity in remuneration between contractual and regular faculty members exacerbates the challenges faced by the latter."
He pointed out that while a faculty member under contract gets Rs 1.25 lakh per month, the regular faculty gets Rs 85,000 for the same designation.
Regularise services, demand doctors
Doctors and professors are advocating for the regularisation of contractual hiring as the most viable solution to address the understaffed GMCs and prevent ineligible faculty from being deployed as examiners.
Speaking to The New Indian Express, Telangana State Medical Council Vice-Chairman Dr Gundagani Srinivas said, "We have been demanding the government to make all the faculty positions permanent. We had also urged that they be paid on par with the doctors at NIMS and AIIMS. We also gave representations multiple times over the same. Less salary is a major issue behind doctors preferring to join private hospitals over government ones. We also want the government to allow the doctors to carry on the private practice outside the official working hours of 9 am to 4 pm."
Dr Srinivas added that the government's latest decision to hire 4,356 new teaching faculty in the colleges was just another temporary fix and that only by making these staff permanent can the issue of under-staffed colleges be resolved.
