Ghost Faculty In Medical Colleges: NMC Makes 75% Attendance Mandatory For Faculty
To deal with the problem of ghost faculty in medical colleges, the National Medical Commission (NMC) has prohibited medical college faculty from participating in private practice during college hours and mandated a compulsory 75% attendance for them.?
This was part of a slew of changes introduced as part of the "Minimum Standard of Requirements for Postgraduate Courses-2023 (PGMSR-2023)" guidelines last week.?
What do the new NMC guidelines say??
The NMC guidelines read as, "Faculty shall be full-time and shall not engage in private practice during college hours. It shall be mandatory to have at least 75 per cent attendance of the total working days for the required number of faculties."?
The faculty, infrastructure, and additional staff in fields such as radio-diagnosis, anesthesia, pathology, microbiology, and biochemistry will be increased in correspondence with the rise in the hospital's bed capacity.?
Furthermore, an increase in faculty and infrastructure is mandated if the department experiences a higher workload, as specified in the guidelines.?
The guidelines also stipulate that 80 per cent of hospital beds should be occupied throughout the year by patients requiring inpatient care and minimum 15 per cent of the total beds in the department imparting post-graduate training should be Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds/high dependency unit (HDU) beds exclusively of that department.?
The guidelines specify that the hospital building must adhere to current national building norms and comply with various local statutory regulations applicable to hospitals.?
These regulations take into account the hospital's role as a service provider, encompassing areas such as administration, registration, record storage, outpatient and inpatient zones, operating theaters, intensive care units (ICU), radiology and laboratory services, emergency areas, and more.?
What is the issue of 'ghost faculty' in medical colleges??
Last year, NMC stated that during the assessment conducted in 2022-23, a significant number of medical colleges were discovered to have fictitious faculty and senior residents.?
Additionally, none of the institutes fulfilled the stipulated requirement of a 50% attendance, as reported by the National Medical Commission.?
"Majority of the colleges had either ghost faculty and senior residents or had not employed the required faculty at all while none of the institutes met with the minimum 50% attendance requirement. Zero attendance was common," the letter from the NMC to the Associations of Emergency Physicians of India (AEPI) said.??
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