New Delhi, Oct 31 : The National Medical Commission (NMC) on Saturday issued a notification regarding minimum requirements for MBBS admissions in medical colleges proposed to be set up or existing ones that wish to increase their student intake.
The ‘Minimum Requirements for Annual MBBS Admissions Regulations-2020’ replace the ‘Minimum Standard Requirements for Medical Colleges-1999 (for 50/100/150/200/250 Annual Admissions’ of the now-defunct Medical Council of India, The Health and Family Welfare Ministry said.
The new regulations applicable to proposed medical colleges and established ones planning to increase their annual MBBS intake from academic year 2021-22 are aimed at affordable medical education.
During the transitory period, established medical colleges will be governed by the relevant regulations existing prior to the current notification.
The new standards have been defined while keeping functional requirements of the medical institutions in mind.
These allow optimisation and flexibility in the utilisation of available resources, and harnessing modern educational technology tools to facilitate moving towards quality education, even when resources are relatively scarce.
The new regulations have done away with land requirement to set up a medical college and its affiliated teaching hospitals (all buildings are expected to conform to existing building by-laws).
Requirement of minimum space for all student-centric areas in medical institutions and functional areas are spelt out, apart from standards to outline sharing of available teaching spaces by all departments (compared with the inflexibility of regulations so far).
Under the new regulations, a well-equipped ‘Skills Laboratory’ to train students would be mandatory.These also define a Medical Education Unit for training medical teachers in educational pedagogy.
The space required for libraries and number of books and journals therein has been rationalised and reduced.Student counselling services have been mandated.
The new regulations now mandate availability of fully functional 300-bed multispecialty hospitals for at least two years at the time of submission of applications for setting up the new medical colleges.
The requirement of beds in various departments of teaching hospital has been aligned with annual student intake, teaching time to be spent in clinical specialties and minimum clinical material required for undergraduate medical training.
The teaching human resource has also been rationalised, and provision for ‘visiting faculty’ made over and above minimum prescribed faculty strength.
Two new teaching departments have been made mandatory in all medical college hospitals for training of undergraduate medical students — Department of Emergency Medicine and Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
The regulations also outlined the ‘desirable and aspirational’ goals beyond minimum requirements in order to goad medical institutions to strive for excellence.These elements will be used by the NMC for rating the medical institutions in the country
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