Curricular Battles: Is it Possible to Win the War even if a Few Battles are Lost?
This paper is a response to the two commentaries (Sircar, 2012; Sarbadhikari, 2012) written for the article â€œReforming Medical Curriculum in India in Recent Years: Conflicts of Political, Regulator, Educationist and Professional Nature and Strategies for their Resolutionâ€ (Sood & Ananthakrishnan, 2012). Considering the enormity of the process of bringing about a change, often compromises have to be made for a step wise approach to make the proposed changes more acceptable across the board. A â€˜one size fits allâ€™ approach is unlikely to work in India because of numerous conflicting pressures and the solution has to be tailored to the specific situations in the country. While a national exit examination as a measure of quality control looks admirable, a number of issues have to be addressed before it can become a reality. The authors conclude that a much higher role of educationists and professionals, consensus building, and political support are essential to achieve successful curricular reforms. A strong regulatory agency could play a definitive role in maintaining standards.
Reforming Medical Curriculum in India in Recent Years: Conflicts of Political, Regulator, Educationist and Professional Natures and Strategies for their Resolution
India has the largest medical education system in the world with 335 medical schools producing about 40,000 medical graduates every year. Most medical schools follow the traditional discipline based medical curricula with division of course into pre-clinical, para-clinical, and clinical phases spread over four and a half years followed by one year of internship. The relevance of training to the societal needs has often been questioned. Attempts have been made repeatedly at reforming the undergraduate curricula and, less frequently, the post graduate medical curricula. Though curricular innovations have been initiated and institutionalized in few medical schools in India over the past two decades, repeated attempts to bring about change at a national level have not met with success. In this paper, the authors share the various conflicts that were often observed during such curriculum reform initiatives and strategies to resolve these conflicts.
Need-based undergraduate medical curriculum
There is a growing concern over the quality of medical education for undergraduates in India. This paper is an attempt to define a need-based curriculum and outline the initiatives taken by the Medical Council of India (M.C.I.) in developing a need-based curriculum. The steps include: clear delineation of goals and objectives of education; adoption of innovative teaching and learning methodology, adjustments in the course structure, updating of course content, rationalizing assessment strategy, and emphasis on structured and skill oriented internship.For effective implementation of these measures, strategies such as establishment of Medical Education Unites (MEUs), visible funding of education more recognition to teaching and impetus to staff development activities have been suggested.