University of Health Sciences loses registration exams after few pass

Pakistan Medical and Dental Council transfers chairmanship to Dow University.

LAHORE: The Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) has transferred control of the National Examination Board (NEB), the body that conducts exams for registration of doctors with foreign qualifications, from the University of Health Sciences, Punjab, to the Dow University of Heath Sciences, Sindh.

Prof Malik Hussain Mubbashar, the vice chancellor of the UHS, had chaired the NEB for a year, during which it conducted two registration exams, both of which had extremely low pass percentages. The PMDC has now announced that Professor Masood Hameed Khan, vice chancellor of Dow University, will chair the board when it conducts the next exam on December 19, 2010.

PMDC President Dr Syed Sibtul Hassan told The Express Tribune that the NEB chair would now rotate among the four provinces, with Prof Khan keeping the seat for two years. He said the exams would be conducted transparently.

But other sources in the PMDC said that there was another motivation for the change. “The registration examination was a big earner for the PMDC,” said one official. “The UHS was very strict with the candidates. The council wants someone who will be more lenient.”

A UHS spokesman said that the university was “stunned” by the PMDC’s decision, especially since it had only been a year since control of the board was given to the university. “We conducted strict examinations and issued certificates to the successful candidates on merit,” he said. “Maybe the PMDC wants easier exams so it can accommodate more doctors who were educated abroad.”

The PMDC handed responsibility for the NEB to the UHS last year after stories appeared in the press about the registration of doctors who had failed the exams and the leaking of the exam paper. “The newspaper reports were very damaging. They reported that a registration certificate was being issued on payment of two million rupees,” said the official.

In the last registration exam in the summer of 2009, when the PMDC remained in control of the NEB, 404 medical graduates appeared and 118 passed, a pass percentage of 29.20 per cent. The dental graduates passed at a rate of 20 per cent.

The pass percentage dropped drastically after Prof Mubbashar was appointed chairman of NEB. Of 526 MBBS graduates from 15 countries that sat the test in the winter of 2009, just 52 passed at a rate of 9.88 per cent. In summer 2010, just 18 of 507 MBBS graduates from 15 countries passed, a pass rate of 3.55 per cent. None of the seven dental graduates could get through the exam.

The NEB is a body constituted by the PMDC (notified in the Gazette of Pakistan, constituted under Part-VII, Section 40 to 63 of the Pakistan Registration of Medical and Dental Practitioners Regulations 2008) which conducts examinations to determine the professional competence or otherwise of a candidate for registration and equivalence of his or her foreign medical or dental qualifications.

To appear in the examination, the candidate must be a citizen of Pakistan and be in possession of a qualification or degree awarded by an institute which is included in the World Directory of Medical Schools published by the World Health Organisation, the Global Directory of Educational Institutions for Health Professionals or the International Medical Education Directory. Since the inception of the NEB test in 1998, the PMDC has issued 3,967 eligibility certificates.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th, 2010.