Shorter MBBS courses to produce doctors for villages

To combat acute shortage of doctors in rural areas, the government has come up with a unique three-and-a-half-year bachelor course in medicine and surgery (MBBS) for students from villages.

The catch is these doctors will not be allowed practise in urban or semi-urban areas.

Once the rural doctors get their degrees, they will be allowed to practise only in notified rural areas. To ensure this, the MCI would renew their practising licence on an annual basis that too on submission of a certificate from the district health officer.

At present, the sub-centres are handled by the auxiliary nurse and midwives (ANMs) and there are no doctors to man them since they prefer to work in urban areas.

“These doctors will work in rural areas. District hospitals with specified bed capacities can be utilised as medical schools for these courses,” said health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad.

According to Dr Ketan Desai, president of Medical Council of India (MCI), this will provide an opportunity to children of villagers to get into the medical stream.

“Only 300 out of India’s 604 districts have medical colleges. There are 34,000 medical seats available at the MBBS level out of which only 10,000 are left for general students after quotas. Some very good students are left out due to stiff competition where mainly the urban students score better due to better coaching facility,” Desai said.

The rural medical course has been almost finalised by the MCI and is likely to be discussed in a conference with vice-chancellors of universities, and health secretaries on February 4.

“The syllabus will be the same. We have only condensed the new course by removing certain things like kidney transplant, angiography, MRI, and radiology from it. All we require at the village level is a doctor who can immediately attend to a patient. This doctor can refer serious patients to district or bigger hospitals,” Desai said.

In rural areas, doctors can handle common ailments like asthma or abdominal ailments. They can also attend to normal child delivery, but they will not conduct surgery or look into complicated cases, Dr Desai said.

The government will begin by picking up 25 students from each of India’s 300 districts which do not have medical colleges. The new MBBS course has been tailor-made to suit the rural requirements.