PIMA demands immediate end to pre-medical students’ grievances

Islamabad : The Pakistan Islamic Medical Association (PIMA) has demanded that pre-medical students’ grievances with reference to the National Medical and Dental College Admission Test (NMDCAT) should immediately be addressed, and the proposed National Licensing Examination (NLE) should be abolished with immediate effect.

Addressing a press conference here on Friday, PIMA representatives including the President of PIMA-Punjab, Dr. Shabbir Ahmad, General Secretary of PIMA-Punjab Dr. Iftikhar Burney, and President of PIMA-Rawalpindi Dr. Muhammad Iftikhar alleged that PMC has opened the gate of corporatization of the healthcare system of Pakistan, leaving the health of people at the hands of private mafia.

The speakers demanded that all private medical colleges be made responsible to ensure availability of all required facilities and faculties required by a teaching hospital, and to arrange for house job and post-graduate training of all their students. “Furthermore, these private colleges and hospitals should be included in CIP as public private partnership,” they said. They also demanded that arrangements be made to turn all district headquarter hospitals into teaching hospitals and to remove all hurdles in post-graduate training processes.

PMC should act as a regulatory body rather than an examining board and regulate the excessively high fees structure, induction of medical students, lack of faculties and resources in private medical colleges and attached teaching hospitals, the speakers demanded.

In the current structure of PMC, there are a few empowered individuals who are handpicked, not democratically elected. Even non-doctors are members of the eight-membered PMC Executive Board. In principle, any law is implemented in a prospective way whereas the current law of PMC has been enacted retrospectively, the speakers [pointed out.

“PMC had decided to conduct a single national online NMDCAT exam in different batches spreading over a whole month, without proper preparation. As a result, multiple gross issues are being reported including power and internet failures, out of syllabus questions, delays in results, issues in scrolling the questions forward or backward, etc. No uniform difficulty index and standardization was ensured. This has given rise to credibility issues, with questions being raised on merit and transparency. Moreover, no transparency is ensured in rechecking of results. PMC has badly failed to conduct NMDCAT owing to its corruption, management failure, technology failure, incompetence, lack of transparency and merit,” the PIMA leadership alleged.

The speakers questioned why after five years of hard work, strenuous written, oral and clinical examinations, medical students should have to take another National Licensing Exams (NLE) after house job. “The modern world is progressing towards minimal evaluation systems but PMC is increasing the burden of exam in addition to an already extensive evaluation and examination system. This shows distrust on the credibility, standard and effectiveness of the existing evaluation system being used by medical colleges of Pakistan for decades—a system that has produced highly qualified doctors working around the globe,” they said.

The PIMA leadership said, PMC was established to replace PMDC, the regulatory body of medical and dental colleges in Pakistan, but it has become more like an examination board rather than regulatory body. “The duties of PMC ought to be to regulate the number of medical students, tuition fee, quality and quantity of faculty staff, quality of education, teaching and research facilities, post-graduation facilities at medical colleges. The irony is that PMC has given free hand to the private medical colleges in all these regulatory matters to become a money making machine,” they said.

PIMA also condemned the use of force by police against peaceful protests of doctors and medical students regarding NLE and MDCAT at Lahore and Quetta and termed it a shameful act.