KARACHI, Jan 30: Federal Health Secretary Syed Anwar Mehmood on Sunday said there was need to make amendments to the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council Act and the colleges and universities providing standard education should be given representation in the council.
Speaking at the concluding session of the symposium organized by the National Institute of Child Health, he said that private colleges had approached the ministry of health and requested to take up the issue of representations in the PMDC.
The concern showed by private institutions was justified and they should be given representation provided they were delivering quality education, he said. Colleges and universities failing to fulfil the criteria set by the PMDC should be recognized in private and public sectors both.
The yearly recognition of colleges should not be practiced any more by the council as it had no sense that the PMDC recognized medical students but did not recognize their education institutions. There were some private institutions delivering quality education, he added.
The secretary said that the PMDC had also suggested some amendments to its Act and it had shown willingness to give representation to private institutions besides reducing its membership from 52 to 26.
He pointed out that the federal government would form a central testing board, whose exam would be mandatory for every medical student before getting registered with the PMDC.
This would help ensure a uniform and standardized minimum qualification requirement for medical graduates passing out each year from different medical colleges and universities across the country.
He said that the government was fully cognizant of the reported anomalies in professional skills of graduates who passed out of various medical institutions each year. Therefore, he said, it had been decided in principle to establish the central testing board.
All local medical graduates produced each year in the country would be required to qualify the test administered under the board prior to be entitled to receive licenses to practice medicine, he said.
He said that the government was focusing on prevention besides providing quality treatment to patients. "We are making strategies to improve primary care gradually. Routine immunization is also being improved and four million additional new borns are being administered vaccine every year," he said.
Prevention of diseases, he said, was needed in local context as a significant number of children continue to die of preventable diseases like diarrhoea, pneumonia, sepsis and typhoid.
Besides, the government was focussing on strengthening mother health care programme as not only the country's maternal mortality rates were considerably high but the poor maternal health status also had its direct impact on infant mortality and infant morbidity in the country.
The federal health secretary said that said that while the government was keen to have maximum number of experts in varied specialties of medicine, including paediatrics, it was equally concerned regarding dearth of qualified nurses.
Anwar Mehmood asked NICH Director Prof Afroze Ramzan Sher Ali to submit PC1 for establishment of new units for chest, gastroenterology, infectious diseases and neurology with the ministry of health and he would get it approved soon after apprising the federal health minister.
Meanwhile, the secretary took strong notice of the inconvenience faced by cancer patients visiting oncology ward of the JPMC due to out-of-order linear accelerator machine.
He asked JPMC Director Prof Mashkoor Alam to submit a detailed report regarding the actual factors that had prevented the department to make equally safe alternative arrangement. - PPI/APP
