New medical colleges: Provisional to provincial

Govt to constitute a provincial medical council if PMDC doesn’t register students.

LAHORE:

Fareeha Shahbaz scored an aggregate of 86 per cent in intermediate exams. She could have gotten into a public medical college in Lahore but chose Sahiwal Medical College as her first option because Sahiwal is her hometown. She got into the college but there’s a catch.

Her admission is ‘provisional’. That means that it is ‘subject to approval by the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC)’.

Shahbaz is not alone. Ayesha Naseem and Saira Gulzar, both scored more than 80 per cent marks, and could have been accepted at any of the top four public medical schools in the province. But they chose to stay in their home towns, Gujranwala and Sialkot respectively.

Their acceptance letters also say ‘provisional’.

About 400 students, who were admitted this year into the four new medical colleges in the Punjab – Gujranwala Medical College; Khawaja Safdar Medical College, Sialkot; Sahiwal Medical College; and DG Khan Medical College – are in the same boat.

The students who were granted admission in the four colleges last year aren’t assured of their situation either. A year after being admitted and attending classes, they have been told by the University of Health Sciences (UHS) to appear in ‘provisional’ MBBS (Part I) exams. The PMDC is yet to recognise the colleges.

“We delayed MBBS Part 1 exams for a month in hopes that our negotiations with PMDC will be successful. But now we [have decided to] take provisional exams of the students [in the four new medical colleges] along with other MBBS students on December 19,” a UHS spokesman confirmed to The Express Tribune.  “We are taking a provisional exam because we don’t want students to panic. They were given admissions on directions from the Punjab government,” he added.

“There is a lot of confusion among students regarding our status.

We are preparing for the exams but we are told it will be a provisional exam. That means even if we pass, it may not count,” a student of Gujranwala Medical College said.

All this has not gone down well with the PMDC which has declared the exams “illegal”. “Students of unregistered medical colleges cannot sit in an MBBS exam,” a PMDC official said while talking to The Tribune. “The admissions [to these schools] are not legal either. We told the Punjab government not to admit any more students this year,” he added.

PMDC registrar, Dr Ahmad Nadeem Akbar, said that he would contact the UHS and the Punjab government to find out why students of unregistered medical colleges were being allowed to sit in a provisional exam and why students were still being admitted to unregistered medical colleges.

Asked why the government had chosen to grant admission to 400 students this year even though the council had advised them not to, an official of the Heath Department said they were following chief minister’s instructions.

“The PMDC is playing with the future of intelligent students. The council has inspected all four colleges but isn’t commenting on their status,” the official said. He said that the council was registering private medical colleges right after inspection.

“They are discriminating against public schools in the Punjab,” the official said, adding that the government had no plans of “going back”. “The matter might now get settled in court,” he added.

Parliamentary Secretary for Health Dr Saeed Elahi said that the PMDC was using delaying tactics and alleged “malafide intentions”. They haven’t said anything about how the new medical schools fall short of their standards, he said, adding that the government would address their concerns “if they tell us what they are”.

“Our set-up, faculty and hospitals are much bigger and better than private schools but PMDC continues to register them and refuse us, on political grounds,” the secretary said.

When asked what the government planned on doing if the PMDC doesn’t register the 800 students, he replied, “We are trying to settle this issue through negotiation. If that doesn’t work, then following the 18th Amendment we can create a Provincial Medical and Dental Council that will register our students,” Elahi said.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 29^th, 2011.