Medical entry examination - another way to marginalizePosted by Naveed on June 22nd, 2021 The Medical Council of India (MCI) is planning to take a national level entrance examination for admission to the MBBS course. MCI causes its work by saying that it wants to improve the standard of medical education in India. There can be no second opinion that the standard of medical education in India is far from satisfactory. There is an urgent need to re-evaluate the standards, content and methodology of medical education in India. Selecting the best students for training may be one of the prerequisites for achieving the standards. But it is still a small step in achieving quality training. Unfortunately for every other vocational education in India, the selection process for admission emerges as the sole determinant of quality. Institution infrastructure, quality of teachers, availability of clinical materials, methodology, research potential, and standardization across the country do not attract attention and debate. This is unfortunate given the huge difference in education standards in different parts of our country and between institutions within countries Study Abroad Consultants in Kannur. Our medical education needs to be evaluated with respect to its content and relevance. The MBBS course is called Medical Education in India while it is called Medical Training all over the world. There is a big difference between the word 'education' and 'training'. Indian medical education involves studying volumes and volumes of books and acquiring theoretical knowledge with less practical training. Like any other education in India, medical education does not help the student to develop practice-oriented thinking and clinical management methodologies. Students trained in the UK or the US are more willing to encounter a patient in a clinic or emergency room even if they have not read as many books as their Indian counterparts. Textbooks from the UK are for UK medical trainees. Cases are shown as if they were in a UK hospital. American medical textbooks present the American hospital environment and American patients. For example, trauma care management is presented in US textbooks with the American Ambulance Service and the emergency room scenario in mind. This is not the situation in our country. Western textbooks give more importance to metabolic and congenital diseases which constitute a huge burden of disease in their countries. Our students read British and American medical books. This may be one of the reasons why they all want to go to Britain and America! They are not trained to go to an Indian village and see a patient in a primary health centre. They don't read much about malaria and skin infections so common in our country. They do not have books that give them comprehensive knowledge of the Indian clinical scenario and they do not get the proper training for Indian clinical practice. We need more research on Indian epidemiology and educational materials based on this. We hear people talking about training our graduates to "international standards". They insist that our professionals must be able to go to any country in the world and survive. The percentage of Indian medical graduates traveling abroad will be less than one percent. Should we design our medical curriculum to help those less than 1% achieve their personal goals? No country in the world should plan its educational programs to train its students to travel abroad. We need doctors to serve our citizens. We want large numbers of doctors to work in rural India. It's crazy to talk about 'international standards' when what we need is a real 'Indian standard'. Another big drawback for the Indian student is that he has to learn medicine in a foreign language. The best way to learn science or medicine is to learn in the mother tongue. This will make the learning process interesting and help develop research thinking. Every European, whether German, Spanish, French or Russian studies medicine in their mother tongue. China, Japan, and even a small country like Thailand offer medical education in their mother tongue. It is a possibility. It's my job. The only opposition is that our students cannot travel abroad and work. This is a flimsy excuse. First of all, let medical graduates not go abroad at all, and leave our country. If they want to go to another country that speaks a different language for training, they have to do exactly what the Chinese, Japanese and Russian do. Graduates of these countries if they want to go abroad, have to learn English, German, French or any other language through a short course. Our students should also do this. Our students may study English as a second language at school. We may add English language teaching in the medical curriculum as an option. So there can be no excuses for not teaching medicine in their native languages in all states. Like it? Share it!More by this author |