Window dressing for medicos

At this time of the year, it is something of an annual ritual for the country’s educational regulators to rattle their sabres against institutions of professional education that come under their purview. Frequently it is engineering colleges that fall afoul of standards, mostly in relation to faculty staffing or lab facilities but also sometimes for something as basic as toilets for girl students. Alas, all too often, the regulators’ wrath soon fizzles out—for whatever reason—and after some perfunctory proceedings, the colleges return to business as usual.

Last week, the National Medical Commission (NMC), the country’s apex regulator of medical education, said it has withheld recognition from 38 medical colleges across the country and served notices on another hundred for various deficiencies. The shortcomings centre around implementing biometric recording of faculty attendance. The commission insists on this technology as it allows it to ascertain whether a college has the teaching and paramedical staff it says it has, and some of the colleges are dragging their feet on it because all too often they don’t.

This is a game played out by regulators and engineering colleges, which has given rise to the phenomenon of the latter renting faculty for a day or two to show to the inspectors, and of bribes being offered to overlook shortcomings. It has led inevitably to the watering down of standards in engineering colleges, the price of which is unfortunately borne by students, whose credentials tend to be doubted by recruiters down the line. It is good that the NMC is cracking the whip on errant medical colleges, but it could go much further to protect the interests of students and the reputation of medical education in the country.

It can for instance make public the entire database of facilities and faculty available—or not available—at each medical college so that prospective students can make informed decisions. This will exert a market-linked pressure on colleges to invest in better facilities: those that accord to high standards will be sought after and those that do not will not be.

Public disclosure of information furnished by colleges and inspection reports filed by regulators will effectively end the phenomenon of ghost faculties. It will allow stakeholders to red-flag any case of faculty members being employed in more than one college.

Indeed, the NMC is under advice by the Central Information Commission to make its annual inspection reports available to the public on its website, as the NMC’s precursor, the Medical Council of India, used to do when it was in existence. Not only are annual inspection reports not available on the NMC website, old reports from the MCI years are no longer accessible. The NMC’s web interface also does not have any provision for whistleblowers to tip off regulators.

The NMC’s inspection and certification process is not transparent, and leaves scope for allegations of malfeasance. It’s a situation that will generate embarrassments of the sort recently reported in the Punjab media regarding the state of affairs at the Chintpurni Medical College in Pathankot. An inspection carried out by the college’s affiliate university found that there were only 12 patients in the hospital as against the 100 claimed, an occupancy rate of 1.8 per cent. There was just one nursing station and one lab technician. Worse, this state of affairs was detected just days after an NMC inspection had found everything kosher at the hospital. Apparently, to satisfy the NMC inspectors, the teaching hospital had made all its nursing and non-medical staff lie down as patients and conducted a free health camp for local villagers to boost the numbers.