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The last time I visited a PHC in Warangal district, I saw pigs roaming on the premises and no medicines in stock Understandably, junior doctos are reluctant to serve there. It’s beside the point that they are only required to do one-year stint.
What use would they be if there are no medicines to dispense? Do I see a policy behind the government’s decree of mandatory rural service for medical students? If there’s one, I’d like to see it.
Our government’s recruitment for the health service is infrequent and contractual. So doctors have no longterm incentive to volunteer for rural service. I have no second thoughts about supporting a rural stint for doctors. But it will not work if one or two states take it up.
States must take up the issue with the Medical Council of India to come up with a national policy on integrating a rural stint into our current medical curriculum. Also, in the present case, it is the reluctance of the state authorities to spell out the guidelines that is causing the confusion.
The medial students are asking pertinent questions: will rural service be part of their course or work experience? In the absence of any clarity, asking them to sign a bond or trying to browbeat them by refusing to give them NOCs for higher studies is unfair. When I studied medicine in the 1960s, it was a seven-year course including one year as house surgeon.
Subsequently, it was reduced by six months. Now, it is a course of four and a half years plus house surgeonship. Therefore, including rural service in the MBBS course and by enhancing the total period to six years is a good idea. But let me see a health policy first. We churn out 5,000 doctors from 40 medical colleges every year. Logically, each PHC can have at least three docs on the premises. It would greatly help the rural poor and would give a great opportunity to doctors to study disease patterns.
In fact, if PHC doctors were tasked to record medical data and their inputs were properly processed, we could evolve a very responsive health policy that would minimise the people’s needs to be treated at tertiary specialities. Sure, let’s send doctors to the rural areas. But let’s have a policy first.
Dr G Venkata Rao is an ortho specialist who was associated with Singareni Collieries hospitals and then with MGM, Warangal.
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