By IT Correspondent
New Delhi, October 16:
In a significant move, the newly constituted National Medical Commission (NMC) is likely to do away with the requirement of minimum five acres of land for setting up a medical college.
The NMC is also planning to reduce the minimum bed requirement for a medical college & make skill labs mandatory. Skill labs have mannequins on which students can practice life-saving skills such as administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation, giving various types of injections, among others. All these changes are part of the ‘Minimum Requirements for Annual MBBS Admissions Regulations, 2020’ for which the NMC has sought feedback from people and various stakeholders by 19 October.
The new regulations laid down the requirements for lecture theatres, libraries, laboratories, minimum bed requirement of the attached medical college, location of faculty offices and students’ accommodation. Each laboratory must have, the minimum number of copies of a given book in the library, the medical journals that the college must subscribe to, and also one rural health and one urban health training centre attached to each college.
The NMC proposed to allow medical colleges to operate out of three campuses in tier I and tier II cities, and Northeast and hilly areas, provided the distance between any two campuses is never less than 10 km or 30 minutes of travel time.
The requirement for the number of beds in a medical college hospital has been proposed to be brought down from 530 to 430 for a 100-seat institute, and from 930 to 830 for a 200-seat college. Earlier the regulations required that a minimum five acres land was essential for setting up of a new medical college, but now this requirement is being changed. According to officials, for setting up a college with 100 seats, just about 2.5 acres would be sufficient under these proposed norms.
A 100-seat college, for example, needs two teaching rooms of 25 people capacity each, and one with 50 people capacity in line with the new idea of small-group teaching in the current medical syllabus. The visiting faculty can be 30 per cent of the required faculty strength, according to the proposed regulations.
“There is a necessity to re-cast medical education and training to enable the medical graduate to be able to effectively discharge their role as a physician in this changing world. The new demands on medical education also necessitate redefining the standards. There is a need to define standards based on functional requirements, rather than in absolute terms. Quality should be the benchmark of the new standard. Optimisation and flexibility in utilising the available resources, and harnessing modern educational technology tools would facilitate in moving towards quality education even when resources are relatively scarce,” according to the preamble of the proposed regulations..
The proposed regulations come close on the heels of the decision by the Medical Council of India (MCI) Board of Governors last month to make a three-month internship at a district hospital mandatory for all postgraduate medical students.
