NEW DELHI: The National Commission on Macroeconomics and Health has suggested a separate commission for medical and health education to promote excellence in healthcare and human resources in the field.

The commission should be empowered to set standards of training, design courses relevant for health needs, standardise and upgrade curriculum. It must undertake integrated planning and development of human resources such as doctors, nurses and paramedical personnel.

The body must formulate a system of accreditation of training institutions and have a corpus fund for providing grants or loans to institutions to help them attain those standards, a report of the Commission said.

The Medical Council of India (MCI), the State Medical Councils and the Nursing Council of India (NCI) had failed to carry out the mandate provided to them for regulating the profession and raising the standards of medical education, the report said. It recommended amendments to the MCI and the NCI Acts to include civil society representation in the Councils. Besides, the MCI should restrict itself to regulating undergraduate education, with postgraduate education being monitored by a separate body. It also expressed concern over the councils of the Department of AYUSH.

The biggest impediment in India's ability to achieve her goals was the lack of human resources, both in terms of availability as well as skills. For instance, there were few health economists. Even the current availability of human resources fell short of the international norm of 2.5 per 1,000 population.

If it were necessary to increase the number of medical colleges and nursing schools to meet the growing need, priority should be given to reducing inequity by establishing 60 medical colleges in deficit States such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. Likewise, there was a need to establish an additional 225 nursing colleges, six public health schools and upgrade the existing ones to serve as benchmarks of excellence.

Live register

The report also suggested the maintenance of a live register and database for all categories of medical and paramedical personnel and regularly updated by the professional councils.

A system of re-registration of doctors and nurses once every five years and provisions for linking re-registration with the minimum number of hours of continuing medical education must be introduced.

It also recommended an independent regulation to assess and monitor the quality aspects of AYUSH practice and functional collaboration of the Indian system of medicines with modern medicine at the primary health centre-level for which a central directorate of integrative medicine could be constituted.

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