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.
The State of Medical Informatics in India: A Roadmap for Optimal Organization
In India, the healthcare delivery systems are based on manual record keeping despite a good telecommunication infrastructure. Unfortunately, Indian policy makers are yet to realize the importance of medical informatics (including tele-health, which comprises e-Health and Telemedicine) in delivering healthcare. In the medical curriculum also, nowhere is this treated as a subject or even as a tool for learning. The final aim of most of the medical and paramedical students should be to become good users, and if possible, also experts for advancing medical knowledge base through medical informatics. In view of the fast changing world of medical informatics, it is essential to formulate a flexible syllabus rather than a rigid one for incorporating into the regular curriculum of medical and paramedical education. Only after that one may expect all members of the healthcare delivery systems to adopt and apply medical informatics optimally as a routine tool for their services.