Medical colleges get notices on donation demands

Islamabad : The Pakistan Medical Commission (PMC) has taken a serious note of the numerous complaints it received against some private medical and dental colleges about demands of donations and advance fee for three to five years and issued notices in this regard.

During a meeting, the council, the supreme decision-making body at the PMC, directed the relevant authority to ensure that once the admission lists are received, they are to be checked against the merit lists issued by the commission to ensure that all students admitted have qualified their MDCAT and to ensure that no student has been treated in a discriminate manner by way of manipulating marks granted in interviews.

"A large disparity between the original merit and the final merit, after adding interview marks, will be reviewed and investigated by the Authority."

The council also approved regular contracts for the 'pre-existing' employees securing employment terms and salary structure.

It said full coverage health insurance for employees’ families, employees’ life insurance and scholarships for employees’ children admitted to medical and dental colleges have also been approved.

The council said the Commission had already enhanced 365 seats in public colleges across the provinces to cater for the HEC scholarship program for Baluchistan and FATA students. The public sector colleges do not require any further approval from the commission to allocate seats from the enhanced seats to the Higher Education Commission for accommodating the scholarship programme students.

The council said it was for the HEC to independently approach every province for the allocation in the relevant public colleges for admission of these quota students as the provinces under the PMC Act 2020 have the exclusive authority to allocate according to it, quota seats in the public colleges.

"To assist the HEC and provinces to coordinate this effort, the Council permitted the public sector universities to provide the final list of students admitted on the HEC Scholarship Programme by March 22, 2021, subject to there being no admission over and above the allocated strength of each college," it said.

The council approved the assessment criteria to be applied to all foreign medical and dental colleges and programmes for purposes of placement in different categories enabling graduates to follow licensing pathways to obtain licences in the country.

According to the criteria, the inclusion of an educational institution’s name in any of A, B and C categories simply shows its verification status and the lists are dynamic. The purpose of these categorised lists is to provide pathways to foreign medical graduates for obtaining a Pakistani licence to practice in Pakistan.

"Many colleges in Category B or C may be under process of being inspected and accredited by an independent agency or a one-tier international regulator and therefore, an institution will be shifted from list B to A once it receives the two-tier verification. The same policy is applicable to institutions in list C i.e. they need to obtain at least a one-tier verification in order to be shifted to list B," it said.