The Hindu : Front Page : Compulsory seminars for doctors soon

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Friday, Jan 05, 2007
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Compulsory seminars for doctors soon

Staff Reporter

Mandatory rural posting for junior doctors on completion of internship

CHENNAI: Doctors will soon have to mandatorily attend continuing medical education programmes to ensure that they stay abreast of the modern management practices in their speciality, the Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said here on Thursday.

Inaugurating a Continuing Medical Education programme in connection with the four-day annual conference of the Indian Psychiatric Society (IPS), Dr. Ramadoss said under the proposed norm, doctors would have to attend 60 hours of CME programmes in five years to be eligible for re-registration.

The Minister said it was also planned to introduce from this year compulsory rural posting for junior doctors on completion of internship. Around 29,000 medical graduates would have to complete a year of service in rural areas to be eligible for permanent registration to set up practice.

New Act

Bringing in a Clinical Establishments Act to regulate standards in hospitals and diagnostic laboratories and modernisation of the medical curriculum to give it a more practical orientation under the guidance of a specially constituted task force are some of the other measures mooted at the Centre, he said.

According to the Minister, the National Mental Health Programme was being restructured to make available psychiatric care across 600 districts in the country. Dr. Ramadoss said the revamp was being implemented with the technical expertise of NIMHANS.

It was aimed at making basic psychiatric care available at the level of primary health centres.

Mooted on the lines of public private partnerships, the national programme would take up training of PHC doctors and nurses for rendering primary psychiatric care with simple drugs under the District Mental Health Programmes. The PHCs would be equipped to tackle almost 60 per cent of psychiatric illnesses and only the difficult cases required referral to a tertiary centre, Dr. Ramadoss said.

The Minister said restructuring exercise of the national programme along with establishing six regional centres of excellence and upgrading infrastructure at 36 mental health institutions would bolster the mental health campaign in the country. Dr. Ramadoss said he aimed to convert what was at present the least performing programme (mental health) in his portfolio to the best performing one in the next three years.

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