This has spelled bad news for the already struggling healthcare sector in the country.
About 600,000 physicians are registered to practice in India, although the actual number would probably be lower if one takes into account emigration and retirements.
According to a study, India needs at least 50,000 medical graduates and about 18,000 post-graduates every year to provide the health facilities to its over one billion population.
When we talk of medical as a graduation option, the numbers are not very encouraging. “Almost 3.5 lac students appeared from all over India for the AIPMT in 2003, but this number had dipped to around 70,000 this year. The number of students taking the Bihar medical entrance too took a plunge, from somewhere around 70,000 in 2003 to less than 30,000 this year,” reveals Bipin Kumar, MD of Goal Institute, which specialises in imparting medical preparatory courses. That means a drop of around 80 per cent in the number of students taking the all-India pre-medical entrance test in the period between 2003 and 2010!
Dr Amulya Kumar Singh, an orthopaedic surgeon, blames the changed mentality of the society for the defection of students towards non-medical fields. “Attractive, easy and get-rich-quick options like MBA have become the order of the day. Parents too are mounting pressure on the kids to get set in life as early as possible and that is leading to talent deviation from the medical field to non-medical ones,” he says, and warns that if this trend continues, in the next four or five years the country will witness a huge vacuum where qualified, talented medical professionals are concerned.
There are, however, various ways to curb this unwelcome trend, as suggested by members of the medical fraternity themselves.
To start with, the government can mull over increasing the salaries of the doctors, considering the ungodly working hours and, in some cases, the ridiculously low remunerations. “In Bihar, the salary of contract doctors in government hospitals has been revised to somewhere around Rs 30,000, while medical interns are getting about Rs 10,000 during their internships,” says Bipin Kumar, and adds that these amounts are still paltry considering the long working-hours and strenuous job-profile of the doctors.
Dr Amlesh Kumar, a dentist by profession, says, “After toiling hard for around 15 years - for that is the time it takes to complete the graduation, specialisation, super-specialisation and other medical training – a good, talented doctor gets what an average IITian with an MBA degree would get upon six years of study. It adds to the frustration! It is high time the medical professionals were fairly compensated.”
To make the rural stint lucrative for the doctors, government can, perhaps, institute a system of faster promotions for doctors working in the rural hospitals compared to those working in urban hospitals.
But the most important step in this direction would be to address the root cause of this “doctor deficiency” syndrome plaguing the country: by creating more doctors!
“Instead of pointing towards greener pastures of instant gratification, parents need to motivate and support their kids if the latter are keen on medical studies. It is a profession which has a struggling period but once that is over, the respect a doctor earns is immense!” says Dr Amulya.
Today, an MBBS degree with internship takes five and a half years and the PG, another three. That adds up to a minimum eight years of labour for the students, if they want to actually enjoy the spoils of their profession! The PG degree itself is very hard to come by, what with only five per cent PG seats in medical colleges compared to graduate seats. “There is no way to shorten the four and a half year duration of the MBBS course as it forms the foundation of the medical studies, but the internship period can definitely be reduced a bit. By trimming the non-functional aspects of the internship, the duration can be reduced from one year to six months,” says Dr Ravindra Kumar Sinha, chest specialist.
The PG or speciality training seats in medical colleges should be increased. “The specialisation seats are very limited, and the super-specialisation seats, negligible! This proves to be the biggest deterrent for medical aspirants. There is urgent need to increase the number of seats in colleges,” he adds, and continues, “The onus lies with the government, to upgrade the colleges and their facilities and equipments so that they meet the rigid MCI specifications for PG courses.”
“Donation in medical colleges needs to be stopped immediately, especially for the PG courses. Whether government colleges or private ones, the admissions should be done on the basis of entrance exams,” says Dr Amlesh.
All these doctors are also unanimous on the opinion that stress has to be laid on infrastructure development of medical studies, like constructing and accrediting more colleges, furnishing the existing ones with better equipments and labs and increasing the intake capacity, without compromising on the quality of education, of course.
Lastly, where the initial struggles of this profession are often misconstrued to be of a chronic nature, parents and students need to let go of this myopic view and look at the larger picture. After all, medicine is one of those professions that bestow a high degree of all three to the practitioner: income, self-satisfaction and respect!
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