Team Bharat Education 
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Published on:
Jun 15, 2024
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The National Medical Commission (NMC), which came into effect in 2019 by an Act of Parliament, aims to improve access to quality and affordable medical education while ensuring the availability of adequate and high quality medical professionals across the country.
NMC comprises of four boards UG Board, PG Board, Medical Assessment and Rating Board and Ethics & Registration Board. Its main job is to ensure curriculum revision and quality of medical education by raising the standards of medical colleges in terms of infrastructure, faculty requirements and clinical materials and assessments.
Increase in colleges and seats
As per the WHO norms, there should be one doctor per 1000 population, however, in 2014, the ratio in India was one doctor for 1500 population, raising concerns.
To address the issue of doctor deficiency, the government has increased the number of medical colleges. From 306 in 2014, the number of colleges have now increased to 706. Similarly, the number of MBBS and PG seats have also increased to 1,10,000 seats and 70,000 seats respectively.
The increase in medical colleges and seats have been made possible due to several measures taken by the government
Conversion of all district hospitals into medical colleges colleges by Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS) of the central government where 60% of the funds are being given by the government and 40% by the state government. Approximately, 157 such medical colleges have been approved and 108 are already functional.
New norms and regulations were adopted for ease of doing business. Rule to open new medical colleges was formulated by removing the restriction of the size of medical college. As per new norms, one professor can teach three PG students and one associate professor can teach only two PG students.
In 2014, the country had only one AIIMS in Delhi which has now been in- creased to 22, of which 20 institutes have already started their MBBS programme.
Furthermore, steps have been taken to improve the quality of medical education by introducing NEET, as a standardised single entrance examination for the whole country, resulting in quality intake of students at the entry level and reducing corruption in the admission process by introducing online common counselling at the state and in central level.
Inspection of medical colleges
New steps in assessments have been initiated wherein the AADHAAR Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS) has been initiated from the academic year 2024-25 and the faculty attendance will be monitored online through Aadhaar linked system. Every medical college have been instructed to mandatorily install 25 CCTV cameras in the colleges and hospitals. This will eliminated the need of physical assessment of the medical colleges.
Similarly, NMC also has plans to monitor the patient inflow into medical colleges and hospitals through ABHA ID monitoring system in collaboration with National Health Authority (NHA). Another significant initiative taken by NMC is the mentor mentee relationship programme in the medical colleges where one faculty will adopt 10 to 15 students from each batch to regularly interact with them. This aims at addressing mental health issues of junior students and reducing ragging in medical colleges.
Future plans
To ensure the quality of education, the NMC, in coming days will introduce the NEXT examination, as a standardised exam for licensing as well as a final year examination. There are plans to start virtual classrooms and digital libraries particularly to help the aspirational medical colleges in district hospitals where there is a deficiency of quality teaching material. To address this, NMC is planning to launch a common centralised digital library where the books or journals can be stored.
The NMC is also contemplating on the idea of having virtual classrooms where well known faculties from India and abroad can hold classes from a centralised studio in NMC, which will be transmitted live to all medical colleges
There is a plan to have a single National Medical Registry (NMR) with each practicing physician having a unique ID, just like Aadhaar, for patient to confirm the professional credentials of the doctor before approaching him/her for treatment.
Furthermore, there are plans to launch an app for the students, which will help in addressing grievances and redressal. It will also archieve education related resources and virtual lectures that can be accessed by students for their studies.
(The author is secretary, National Medical Commission)
Published By : Education Times
