APROPOS the letter ‘PMDC working’ (March 11). The PMDC is a regulatory body concerned solely with the education, qualification, curriculum, registration of doctors, approval of new medical and dental colleges, and their monitoring.

It does not look after hospitals or regulate patient care. Hospitals in Sindh are regulated by the Sindh Healthcare Commission as per the information available on the PMDC website.

Second, it is misleading to say that vice chancellors of medical universities are administrators. According to the Higher Education Commission’s criteria and the Act of Universities, all vice chancellors of universities have to be professors, a rank achievable only after decades of teaching. The vice chancellors are selected after a tedious painstaking process.

Third, according to the 1962 PMDC Act, all medical colleges had representation on the body but the individuals who represented the institutes’ functioning all over Pakistan were always academicians, not hospital administrators.

The incumbent PMDC ad hoc committee also consists of vice chancellors as representatives of each province. Therefore, how does one expect a non-academic person to perform a purely academic function?

The appointment of an administrator to an academician’s post in a medical university is unfair to aspiring doctors going through a gruelling pace to become members of the Hippocratic profession.

Dr Irfan Ashraf
Karachi

Published in Dawn, March 22nd, 2018