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Friday March 29, 2024

A medical supreme court

By our correspondents
December 01, 2015
This refers to the article, ‘PMDC – RIP’ (The News on Sunday, November 8) by Syed Mansoor Hussain. While supporting the writer’s call for giving a larger role to the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan in postgraduate education, his other suggestions – breaking the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council into provincial and even district level organisation and having minimal third-party control over the quality of house job – are frightening. A PMDC breakup will create immense problems for doctors working abroad.
The basic problem is that all provinces are strangely represented evenly in the PMDC in disregard to their respective population strength. The second issue is that the new setup is heavily tilted in favour of medical college associated doctors, which is not good because the backbone of healthcare is GPs and private specialists. Though the 1967 PMDC ordinance was a detailed piece of legislation, the CPSP ordinance was vague in terminology. Therefore, the need is to revise the CPSP ordinance, expand colleges into medical, surgical, gynaecology, radiological and pathological colleges and give them exclusive domain over postgraduate education. The PMDC should remain as a federal statutory body for medical practitioners and take care of undergraduate education. The CPSP and PMDC decisions should be challengeable in the proposed medical ombudsman court which should act as a ‘supreme court of medical matters’ in the country.
Dr Mansoor Elahi
Islamabad