SALIENT FEATURES OF REGULATIONS ON GRADUATE MEDICAL
EDUCATION
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here to view complete Regulation. (Amendments incorporated in pdf)
NOTIFICATION
In exercise of the powers conferred by Section 33 of the Indian Medical Council
Act, 1956 (102 of 1956) the Medical Council of India with the previous sanction
of the Central Government hereby makes the following regulations, namely :-
(1) Short title and commencement : (1) These regulations may be called the
“Regulations on Graduate Medical Education, 1997”.
(2) They shall come into force on the date of their publication in the Official
Gazette.
CHAPTER 1
2. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS AND TEACHING APPROACH
(1) Graduate medical curriculum is oriented towards training students to
undertake the responsibilities of a physician of first contact who is capable of
looking after the preventive, promotive, curative & rehabilitative aspect of
medicine.
(2) With wide range of career opportunities available today, a graduate has a
wide choice of career opportunities. The training, though broad based and
flexible should aim to provide an educational experience of the essentials
required for health care in our country.
(3) To undertake the responsibilities of service situations which is a changing
condition and of various types, it is essential to provide adequate placement
training tailored to the needs of such services as to enable the graduates to
become effective instruments of implementation of those requirements. To avail
of opportunities and be able to conduct professional requirements, the graduate
shall endeavour to have acquired basic training in different aspects of medical
care.
(4) The importance of the community aspects of health care and of rural health
care services is to be recognized. This aspect of education & training of
graduates should be adequately recognized in the prescribed curriculum. Its
importance has been systematically upgraded over the past years and adequate
exposure to such experiences should be available throughout all the three phases
of education & training. This has to be further emphasized and intensified by
providing exposure to field practice areas and training during the intership
period. The aim of the period of rural training during internship is to enable
the fresh graduates to function efficiently under such settings.
(5) The educational experience should emphasize health and community orientation
instead of only disease and hospital orientation or being-concentrated –
on-curative -aspects. As such all the basic concepts of modern scientific
medical education are to be adequately dealt with.
(6) There must be enough experiences to be provided for self learning. The
methods and techniques that would ensure this must become a part of
teaching-learning process.
(7) The medical graduate of modern scientific medicine shall endeavour to become
capable of functioning independently in both urban or rural environment. He/she
shall endeavour to give emphasis on fundamental aspects of the subjects taught
and on common problems of health and disease avoiding unnecessary details of
specialization.
(8) The importance of social factors in relation to the problem of health and
diseases should receive proper emphasis throughout the course and to achieve
this purpose, the educational process should also be community based than only
hospital based. The importance of population control and family welfare planning
should be emphasized throughout the period of training with the importance of
health and development duly emphasized.
(9) Adequate emphasis is to be placed on cultivating logical and scientific
habits of thought, clarity of expression and independence of judgment, ability
to collect and analyse information and to correlate them.
(10) The educational process should be placed in a historic
background as an evolving process and not merely as an acquisition of a large
number of disjointed facts without a proper perspective. The history of Medicine
with reference to the evolution of medical knowledge both in this country and
the rest of the world should form a part of this process.
(11) Lectures alone are generally not adequate as a method of training and are a
poor means of transferring/acquiring information and even less effective at
skill development and in generating the appropriate attitudes. Every effort
should be made to encourage the use of active methods related to demonstration
and on first hand experience. Students will be encouraged to learn in small
groups, through peer interactions so as to gain maximal experience through
contacts with patients and the communities in which they live. While the
curriculum objectives often refer to areas of knowledge or science, they are
best taught in a setting of clinical relevance and hands on experience for
students who assimilate and make this knowledge a part of their own working
skills.
(12) The graduate medical education in clinical subjects should be based
primarily on out-patient teaching, emergency departments and within the
community including peripheral health care institutions. The out-patient
departments should be suitably planned to provide training to graduates in small
groups.
(13) Clinics should be organised in small groups of preferably not more than 10
students so that a teacher can give personal attention to each student with a
view to improve his skill and competence in handling of the patients.
(14) Proper records of the work should be maintained which will form the basis
for the students’ internal assessment and should be available to the inspectors
at the time of inspection of the college by the Medical Council of India.
(15) Maximal efforts have to be made to encourage integrated teaching between
traditional subject areas using a problem based learning approach starting with
clinical or community cases and exploring the relevance of various preclinical
disciplines in both understanding and resolution of the problem. Every attempt
be made to de-emphasize compartmentalisation of disciplines so as to achieve
both horizontal and vertical integration in different phases.
(16) Every attempt is to be made to encourage students to participate in group
discussions and seminars to enable them to develop personality, character,
expression and other faculties which are necessary for a medical graduate to
function either in solo practice or as a team leader when he begins his
independent career. A discussion group should not have more than 20 students.
(17) Faculty member should avail of modern educational technology while teaching
the students and to attain this objective, Medical Education Units/ Departments
be established in all medical colleges for faculty development and providing
learning resource material to teachers.
(18) To derive maximum advantage out of this revised curriculum, the vacation
period to students in one calendar year should not exceed one month, during the
4 ˝ years Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) Course.
(19) In order to implement the revised curriculum in toto, State Govts. and
Institution Bodies must ensure that adequate financial and technical inputs are
provided.