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.
A Multi-Stakeholder ’User Driven’ Medical Curriculum to Improve Health Care Outcomes: A Commentary on Sood and Ananthakrishnan’s “Reforming Medical Curriculum in India in Recent Years: Conflicts of Political, Regulator, Educationist and Professional Natures and Strategies for their Resolution”
In this commentary of Sood et al, which stresses on the linking of teaching, learning and asÂ­sessment methods to learning objectives toward achieve excellence in postgraduate medical education, the commentator points out that policy making bodies seem to ignore that. While the authors seem to stress on communicating this aspect, the competent authorities prefer to form non-communicating Committees for delinking teaching / learning from assessment. The authors must be thanked for bringing out these issues for possible debates among all the stakeholders, leading to a renewed effort towards meaningful, timely and useful reforms of the healthcare education system in India.
Principles of Curriculum Design
The curriculum is made up of all the experiences learners have that enable them to reach their intended achievements from the course. 
 
A curriculum statement should enable learners, teachers and managers to know and fulfil their obligations in relation to the course. It should describe intended learner achievements, content to be covered, teaching, learning, supervision, feedback and assessment processes, entry requirements and course structure. 
 
A syllabus is simply a list of the main topics of a course of study. This is only part of the curriculum. 
 
The way in which a curriculum for medical education is designed depends on the designers’ views about how students learn, how medicine is practised, social responsibility and accountability, the role of the knowledge base, professional values, and health service development. 
 
The curriculum design process should ask what is the purpose of the educational programme, how will the programme be organised, what experiences will further these purposes, and how can we determine whether the purposes are being attained? 
 
There is no body of evidence which shows that there is one best choice for framing a curriculum as a whole of any of it parts. A curriculum should simply be fit for the purpose and context of its day.