ISLAMABAD, Aug 5: The Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) has banned the migration of faculty members from one medical or dental college to another during the academic year.
The decision was taken at the 109th meeting of the council which concluded here on Sunday.
Briefing mediapersons after the meeting, president PMDC Prof Dr Syed Sibtul Hasnain said the meeting took note of the trend of faculty migration, which badly affected the students, and evolved a mechanism to check the trend. He said the registration of faculty members of all the medical and dental colleges had been made mandatory. The faculty members will not be allowed to switch over to some other institutions for monetary benefits or other reason during the academic year.
He said if some faculty moved from one college to another, both of the institutions would be required to inform the PMDC. The purpose is not to punish the teachers but to preserve the interest of the students, he added. The institution from where a faculty member migrates would be persuaded to make his replacement with the same qualifications.
The meeting also decided to take action against medical and dental colleges involved in admitting students more than their sanctioned seats. He said a one-time relaxation would be given to such institutions by merely imposing a penalty on them and the over-admitted students as of today would be regularised. But in future the colleges found to be violating the decision would be closed down.
He said the meeting decided to give teaching allowance to all the faculty members irrespective of their specialty in order to remove disparity between basic and clinical and medical and dental teachers.
Prof Hasnain said the PMDC took note of the increasing trend of quackery in the country and decided to approach the secretary information to ensure a check on quacks making claims through media publicity of guaranteed treatment of diseases like cancer, hepatitis and diabetes melitis.
He said the PMDC’s proposal was enactment of a law explaining what sort of information should be allowed to reach the patients.
He said the PMDC had recommended 68 medical and dental institutions for recognition and the final decision would be taken by the ministry of health.
He said there were two or three institutions left which had not been recommended for recognition for being deficient and failing to fulfil the criteria. He, however, did not disclose the names of these institutions.
He said the recommendations for recognition had been made in line with a judgment of the Supreme Court passed on December 15, 2006, declaring that there was no provision in the law for provisional recognition of medical and dental institutions.
He said the number of permanently-recognised medical and dental colleges on June 15, 2006 was only 27 — 21 in the public and six in the private sector, while there were 29 provisionally- recognised colleges - seven in the public sector and 22 in private sector.
