The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Distance education opportunities for doctors

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jul 26, 2009
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Distance education opportunities for doctors

The Problems in healthcare scenario in India today are three fold:

Inadequately trained graduate physicians with unethical practices

Excessive and unwanted referrals to specialists

Escalating health costs

What is the solution?

If physicians, especially GP’s, are trained, equipped and ethically sensitized, they will have a significant impact in our country. The number of referrals will go down and health care costs decline. Distance education using all the pedagogic methods seems to be the ideal answer for the situation. The only way one can make a national impact is to train large numbers. This motivated CMC, Vellore, a premier institution for medical education in India involved in medical education for over 50 years to start a ‘2 year family medicine diploma course’ to promote this concept of training and empowering general practitioners- “The refer less resolve more initiative”.

Why Family Medicine?

A family physician is a multi-competent specialist who can handle efficiently and confidently more than 90% of the common ailments.

A Family Physician concept is a tried and successful model in health systems of developed countries like USA and UK.

In the absence of this concept, patients either approach physicians practicing nearby who are not confident of handling them or end up referring most cases to specialists or patients themselves choose to go to specialists. So a Family Physician is the need of the hour.

Course details:

The Course: Post Graduate Diploma in Family Medicine (PGDFM)

A two year distance education course to become a Family Physician who is a multi-competent specialist, who not only provides the point of first contact but also provides the continuum of care.

Objectives: To build the capacity of General Practitioners (Private and Government Doctors )and to enable them to manage more cases at their level reducing referrals and to pass on the benefits to the patients of weaker section of the society.

Structure of the course: Course Duration - 2 years with 4 semesters of 6 months each. Maximum duration allowed to complete the course is 3 years.

Study Materials: Each semester will cover 3 booklets and the course is covered in a total of 12 booklets. Each booklet designed to be completed in 2 months time by spending an average time of 2 hours per day.

Eligibility: Candidate should possess a valid MBBS degree.

Curriculum: 75 Problem based interactive modules covers multiple specialities relevant to a Family Physician. There are about 60 video-lectures by the expert faculty of CMC. Also there will be live tele-conferencing sessions based on the video lectures. Expert faculty from CMC will be available for clarifications of doubts and queries.

Contact Programmes: There will be 3 Sessions of contact classes each session of 10 days duration. These sessions will be conducted in the regional study centre. Contact classes will include bedside clinical teaching and discussion on management of cases by senior specialist consultants. Contact classes are mandatory for all the candidates.

Award of Diploma: Candidate should satisfy the following criteria:

-Yearly examinations: Two examinations will be conducted at the regional centres - One at the end of 2nd Semester and the other at the end of 4th Semester of the course. The examination will comprise of 2 Papers: Paper I Theory, Paper II Practical

-Also candidate should satisfactorily complete the assignments, log books and project work in order to obtain the diploma

Dr. Vinod Shah