No medical college had adequate faculty members or senior residents and all failed to meet the 50% attendance requirement, according to the assessment of 246 colleges in 2022-23 by the Under Graduate Medical Education Board (UGMEB) under National Medical Commission (NMC), country’s apex medical education regulator for granting recognition for running MBBS courses. “Majority of the colleges had either ghost faculty and senior residents or had not employed the required faculty at all while none of the institutes met with the minimum 50% attendance requirement. Zero attendance was common,” the letter from the NMC to the Associations of Emergency Physicians of India (AEPI) said. The attendance of the faculty members was monitored randomly during the working days for about two months, using the newly instituted Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance system. According to the board, there were 134 colleges that had emergency medicine departments “on paper” whereas the ground reality was different. “We found out that no student goes to the emergency medicine department regularly because there is no one in the department to interact with them other than the casualty medical officer. The posting in the emergency medicine department is supposed to be a break period for the students,” according to the letter, a copy of which is with The Indian Express. The Associations of Emergency Physicians of India had written to NMC sharing their grievance regarding the exclusion of emergency medicine speciality as requirement for setting up new medical colleges. While medical colleges needed to mandatory have emergency medicine speciality 2022-23 batch onwards, the requirement was later done away with by medical commission owing to faculty shortage. The number of medical college hospitals that have an emergency medicine department has increased from 45 to 134 in the last few years, the reply said.
