Bill to revamp medical education cleared

National Exit Test must for practice
In a move to bring sweeping changes to the medical education sector, the Centre plans to introduce the National Medical Commission (NMC) Bill in this session of Parliament and repeal the Indian Medical Council Act, 1956. The Union Cabinet approved a revised version of the Bill on Wednesday, almost two years after the original version was introduced in Parliament in December 2017. The 2017 Bill, which had provoked widespread protests over a proposal for bridge courses to allow AYUSH practitioners to prescribe allopathic medicines, was referred to a Parliamentary Standing Committee and amended to remove that contentious initiative. However, it lapsed with the dissolution of the 16th Lok Sabha. The current Bill proposes to convert the final year MBBS examination into a licentiate exam, which will be a requirement for doctors to practise medicine. The Bill also proposes to unify all entrance procedures to enforce common standards. Under the Bill, the NMC will have four autonomous Boards — Undergraduate Medical Education Board, Post-Graduate Medical Education Board, Medical Assessment and Rating Board, and Ethics and Medical Registration Board. The final year examination of the MBBS course, to be called the National Exit Test (NEXT), will also be used for entrance into post-graduate medical courses, and act as a screening test for foreign medical graduates, according to an official statement. Apart from NEXT, the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) and common counselling for admissions will be used by all institutions. This includes Institutes of National Importance which have been allowed to follow their own admission procedures so far such as the various All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER), Puducherry and the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh. The Commission would also be responsible for regulating fees and all other charges for 50% of the seats in private medical colleges and deemed universities.

Source : https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/bill-to-revamp-medical-education-cleared/article28533564.ece

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