The Centre would recognize foreign post-graduate degrees in medicine by English speaking countries, Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Anbumani Ramadoss said.
BANGALORE: The Centre would recognize foreign post-graduate degrees in medicine by English speaking countries, Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Anbumani Ramadoss said here on Saturday.
"As a move to encourage Indian doctors who pursue further tudies abroad to come back and practice here, we will ecognise foreign post-graduate degrees in medicine by English speaking countries, starting with five (countries) to begin with," he said at the convocation of National Board of Examinations under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
The five nations are UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, he said adding it would be followed by Singapore and European countries.
"Initially it will be a unilateral recognition. As the process evolves, it will become bilateral," Ramadoss said.
In view of increasing importance of emergency care, government would soon launch a national programme on Emergency and Trauma Care. "However, we need more human resource for this", he said.
In about four to five months, National Urban Health Mission would be rolled out in 429 cities and district headquarters, focusing on around 5.5 crore slum population in the cities.
Regretting that National Board of Examinations which had global recognition lacked national recognition, Ramadoss said, the ministry however recognised that DNB examination is unbiased and much more standardised than the MD or MS examination across the country and efforts would be made to solve the difficulties of parity faced by DNB candidates.
"With the Indian population touching around 150 crore in the next 45 years, we would not only need much more hospital beds, but also more number of doctors and post-graduates in the field to reach out to rural areas," Ramadoss said.
The country required nearly 25,000 post-graduate seats in various medical specialties every year, he said, adding "however, here it is not just quantity but quality which is important".
He said medical colleges were not uniformly spread in the country as out of 271 colleges, 175 were in six states -- Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra.
In his message to DNB post-graduates, he said they should focus on ethics as it was a noble profession. "We harvest about 5.5 million units of blood annually as against a requirement of 7.5 million units," Ramadoss said.
Prof N K Ganguly, former Director General Indian Council of Medical Research in his convocation address called for a global perspective by the young medical practitioners.
With rapid urbanisation, the coming years will see more and more people living in urban ghettos and rapid rise in elder population, he said.
Environmental degradation will lead to medical challenges arising due to use of pesticides, outdoor and indoor pollution. Young doctors have to grapple with new diseases which have sprung up like the SARS virus, avian flu, chandipura virus and encephalitis besides diabetes, he said.
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