NEW DELHI/From Our Bureau
The National Medical Commission (NMC) has proposed to make it mandatory for every student taking admission in medical colleges to adopt a rural family and meet it at least once a month during four years of study.
The medical students will have to collect data on their adopted families like their habits and diseases and they will have to submit a report as part of their medical education.
An NMC official said the medical students remaining in touch with the rural families will enable them to assess the requirements of the villages to be prepared to take up the rural jobs. Around 85,000 students take admissions in the first year of the MBBS course and as such they will be in constant touch with the families they adopt and nurse.
Presently, they have to take the community medicine course in the rural areas, but the new scheme is altogether different. NMC plans to introduce this family adoption programme from the new batch of students, after obtaining opinions of all stakeholders, the NMC official said.
He pointed out that 66% population lives in the rural areas, but 75% of the doctors prefer urban postings and as such various attempts to remove the shortage of the doctors in the rural areas have not succeeded.
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