KEMU: Medical school running depts without professors

VC says university will advertise soon for biochemistry and pharmacology teachers.

LAHORE:

The most prestigious medical school in the Punjab is struggling to find professors and two of its departments have been headed by assistant professors for the last two years, The Express Tribune has learnt.

Students have lodged several complaints with the administration of King Edward Medical University (KEMU) about the lack of teaching faculty at the biochemistry and pharmacology departments.

Both departments have one assistant professor each, but no associate professor or professor. The seats of associate professor and professor fell vacant during the tenure of former vice chancellor Dr Zafarullah Khan and haven’t been filled since then. The Pharmacology Department has eight demonstrators and the Biochemistry Department has seven.

According to Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) criteria, there should be three professors, six assistant professors and 16 demonstrators per 300 students in a department, a PMDC official told The Tribune. He said the council could cancel the affiliation of an institution that had an acute shortage of teachers, but that was unlikely to happen with a public college.

The KEMU has 300 MBBS Part I students and 300 MBBS Part II students who study biochemistry and pharmacology, apart from dentistry and physiotherapy students who also study biochemistry. “For more than 750 students, there is just one assistant professor. It is not enough,” a KEMU faculty member said.

An MBBS Part II student said that the lack of teachers made both subjects “extremely difficult”. He said that the assistant professors were often too busy to give students individual attention. “Most of the students don’t understand lectures and they have to try to understand it themselves or get guidance from the seniors. This is a serious problem,” he said.

A KEMU faculty member said that the Biochemistry Department had been without a professor since Prof Kamran Aziz retired two years ago. Prof Bashir Bhatti, the last professor to head the Pharmacology Department, went on leave prior to retirement also two years ago. Dr Azam, an assistant professor at the Biochemistry Department, was transferred to the Gujranwala Medical College because it had no teachers, another senior faculty member said.

Other public medical colleges in Lahore including Allama Iqbal Medical College, the Services Institute of Management Sciences and Fatima Jinnah Medical College, have professors for these subjects.

KEMU Vice Chancellor Dr Asad Aslam said the university had been unable to advertise the posts for a while because of a legal challenge by some teachers seeking promotions, but that problem had now been overcome.

“We will release an advertisement for the vacant posts through the Directorate General of Public Relations (DGPR) in a day or two and the ads will be published in the newspapers. We will fill the posts,” he said.

However, he added that there was an “acute shortage” of qualified people to teach basic sciences. Also, these people could get higher salaries in the private sector. “A biochemistry professor gets around Rs400,000 a month in a private medical college,” he said. He added that it wasn’t against the rules for an assistant professor to head a department.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 9^th, 2012.