Majority of medical colleges have ghost faculty, all fail to meet the 50% attendance requirement, says NMC

Digital Desk: According to the assessment of 246 medical colleges conducted in 2022–2023 by the Under Graduate Medical Education Board (UGMEB) under the National Medical Commission (NMC), the nation's top medical education regulator for granting recognition for running MBBS courses, no medical colleges had adequate faculty members or senior residents, and all failed to meet the 50% attendance requirement.

"Most colleges either employed no faculty at all, ghost faculty, senior residents, or neither, and none of the institutes satisfied the minimal 50% attendance requirement. In the letter to the Associations of Emergency Physicians of India (AEPI), the NMC stated that "zero attendance was common."

 

Using the recently implemented Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance system, the faculty members' attendance was monitored randomly during the working days for around two months.

 

The board claimed that 134 colleges "on paper" possessed emergency medicine departments, but the situation on the ground was different. 

"Because there is just the casualty medical officer at the emergency department to connect with students, we discovered that none of them visit it regularly. The student's duty in the emergency medical department is supposed to be a break period, " the letter stated.

 

The Associations of Emergency Physicians of India had written to NMC to express their displeasure over the emergency medicine specialization's removal as a requirement for the establishment of new medical colleges. While medical colleges needed to have emergency medicine speciality 2022-23 batch onwards, the requirement was later done away with by the medical commission owing to faculty shortage.