PG Times

In a bid to encourage government doctors to serve in remote areas, the government plans to provide them with reservation in postgraduate courses, the Lok Sabha was informed on Friday. Minister of State for Health Faggan Singh Kulaste said during Question Hour that the government proposes to bring the Indian Medical Council (Amendment) Bill to ensure that 50 per cent of the seats in postgraduate courses in government colleges are reserved by States for medical officers in government services who have served “at least three years in remote and difficult areas.” The Bill proposes that after completing the PG course, the medical officers could once again be asked to serve another three-year term in a difficult area. The Minister said the WHO country office has clarified that there was no report in the recent past that stated that 70 per cent of the rural population in the country has minimal access to healthcare.

Arunabha Sengupta In "The Steel Windpipe", by Mikhail Bulgakov, a young doctor is faced with the choice of an emergency operation he had never done before or letting a child die. He dares and the child survives. Such and much more complex situations occur across the medical world daily where doctors decide to skate on thin ice to reach a destination than not proceed at all. In an atmosphere of mutual trust and compassion, society accepted this as a fact of life. That trust is now perceived by the laity to have been breached, giving rise to suspicions of 'crimes' such as incompetence and negligent treatment. The State has stepped in to protect the public by introducing a new bill with a few modifications, some aspects of which need to be debated from economic and medical points of view. The new bill re-emphasizes that private hospitals cannot demand upfront payment for emergency treatment and should recover their costs later, even though it does not define th...

Should doctors strike? I have been a part of many protests as a medical professional. As a medical student, as an intern, and as a resident. So I can fully understand the sentiments of how this strike has come about. So I believe I can speak on behalf of the striking doctors. Believe me, it is always a moral and ethical quandary -- we make no bones about it. As with all doctors all around the world -- Indian doctors too suffer from being absent to their own families, many going through bad marriages and suffering the stress of being overworked. Doctors have a higher incidence of alcohol and tobacco usage as well as drug abuse than other professionals. Depression is real in this profession riddled with uncertainties. In addition to these problems in the context of India, we have several other problems. -------------------------------- We want to treat patients. I could say with some confidence that the vast majority of us in this profession love what we do and would rather...

The apex court has expressed its inability to provide any record on long summer break under the RTI application. Informing the Chief Information Commissioner in response to RTI activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal's application, it said "Information relating to practice of summer vacation etc, there is no record available. For about seven long decades since Independence, the Supreme Court of India and other high courts have been following the practice of more than a month-long summer vacation and week-long Holi, Diwali and Dussehra holidays but have no record about how and when the practice started. The apex court has expressed its inability to provide any record on long summer break under the RTI application. Informing the Chief Information Commissioner in response to RTI activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal's application, it said "Information relating to practice of summer vacation etc, there is no record available." However, the top court's registry wo...

The Supreme Court on Thursday asked search engines such as Google and Yahoo to adopt in-house mechanisms to identify and block content relating to pre-natal sex determination. “The sex ratio is going down and this is likely to affect the prospect of human race,” the court observed orally. A bench headed by justice Dipak Misra also directed the centre to constitute a nodal agency empowered to take action on any TV, radio and newspaper advertisements for pre-natal sex determination. “Any content in contravention with the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act (PNDT), 1994 cannot be permitted,” the court said. However, search engines opposed the court’s directive to filter content suggesting that it would open a pandora’s box. The court’s order asking search engine companies to regulate content on the web is seen by free speech activists as a move allowing censorship by private parties. The PNDT Act prescribes three-year jail for advertisements relating to ...

EVEN before the drama over the death of a pregnant nurse on February 4 started, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) had been witnessing a silent tussle between two important wings — nurses and resident doctors. While battlelines are now clearly drawn between the two sides over the suspension of five resident doctors accused of negligence, the two wings have been at loggerheads for the last six months over another issue — who will draw blood samples of patients. The issue cropped up in August last year, when the Resident Doctors’ Association (RDA) unilaterally decided that no resident doctor would draw blood samples. Sources confirmed that the proposal was given a green signal by the medical superintendent. However, the nurses’ union opposed the decision and the resident doctors went back to drawing the samples. The RDA argued that drawing blood samples has resulted in “increased work load” and “decreased time, which should be spent on developing skills for ...

Peter Mansfield, who won the medicine Nobel prize in 2003 for developing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has died aged 83. The scanning technology he pioneered in the 1970s is now routinely used for diagnosing illnesses and injury – nowadays virtually every hospital has a MRI machine. Sir Peter Mansfield, who laid the scientific foundations of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), failed his 11-plus exams but blossomed into one of the UK’s leading medical technologists and a Nobel Prize winner. Mansfield, who died this week at the age of 83, was the son of a London gas fitter and grew up in Camberwell, south London. After leaving his secondary modern school at 15, he worked first as a printer’s assistant and then as a technician at the government’s Rocket Propulsion Establishment in Westcott, Buckinghamshire. His academic aptitude emerged there when he did A-levels part-time. He went on to study physics at Queen Mary University of London, where he worked on nuclear magn...