M F AHMAD
Daltonganj, June 29: The Jharkhand State Health and Family Welfare Department have asked the director of Medical Education Dr Arun Kumar, who is also the principal of the Phulo Jhano Murmu Medical College Dumka, to explore the possibility of the internship training for foreign medical graduates who are back home in various districts of Jharkhand from the war-ravaged Ukraine.
A medical graduate, foreign or indigenous, has to have mandatory one-year compulsory rotary residential internship training which allows the medical graduate to get his registration certificate.
Dr Arun Kumar said there is no vacant seat for internship training for the foreign medical graduates in the medical colleges located at Jamshedpur and Dhanbad. All seats for the internship training are full. The medical college at Dhanbad has an intake capacity of only 50 admissions.
However, there is some elbow room left in the medical college located at Hazaribagh where internship training possibilities can be a reality.
The director of medical education cautioned that as per the National Medical Commission only 60 percent of the foreign medical graduates are to be allowed in the one-year compulsory rotary residential internship training.
As for the residential internship training at the medical colleges at Dumka and Palamu, there is an issue of lack of faculties, Kumar added.
He said, “I would like to talk about our Phulo Jhano Murmu medical college Dumka. We do not have faculty members in the department of psychiatry, anaesthesia, radiology and skin. How can we afford to have foreign medical graduates here for one-year compulsory rotary residential internship training?”
Sources said that the fate of the Medinirai Medical College in Palamu is no better than what one sees in the Dumka-based medical college. It is facing the same issue of shortage of faculties.
Kumar added that there is an acute deficiency of faculties. Therefore, a mid-internship training migration of foreign medical graduates from one medical college to the other is just not appropriate academically or otherwise.
A large number of Jharkhand students have returned home from various medical universities in Ukraine.
According to Palamu DC Shashi Ranjan, there are around half a dozen Palamu students who have returned from the war-struck Ukraine. Many of the returnees are second and third-year medical students. In Jharkhand, they are attending online classes from Ukraine-based universities.
One such returnee is Raj Nandini, daughter of Manoj Gupta of Barwadeeh block in Latehar. She informed lagatar24.com that she was in a third-year medical course at the Vinnisia Medical University, Ukraine but when the war broke out she returned to India under the Operation Ganga rescue plan of the government of India in March.
She added that she is taking online theory classes from her university in Ukraine but is worried about her career. She says there is complete uncertainty as to when she will be called back by her university in Ukraine for offline classes.
On academic rehabilitation of such medico returnees from Ukraine, Dr Arun Kumar said, “We do not know where to make them sit in our medical colleges to pursue their courses as medical colleges have an upper limit of intake capacity and it is full.”
There cannot be any increase in the number of seats unless it is permitted by the National Medical Commission as any meddling with the number of seats will invite cancellation of the approval from the National Medical Commission of the said medical college, said sources.
Sources added that the Medinirai medical college is set to start its third-year course with 92 students who took their admission in the 2019 -20 session. These students are waiting for their second-year practical and viva exams to be over.
“Once the results of the second year MBBS professional course exams are out, we will get into our third year,” said the principal of the Medinirai medical college at Pokhraha in Daltonganj Dr Shailendra Kumar.
He said he has no idea as to how and what to do with the Ukraine medico returnees.
