Impact of private medical educational institutions on the quality of students entering medical education in Tamil Nadu

Abstract

Health care is very important to any country and that too for a Country like India with more than one billion population having 70 percent (Census of India) of the people in rural, the distribution of quality health care and its affordability is very important for the people to have a minimum standard of living. Individual s life and well being is also at risk if the quality of treatment is below the best. Hence it is imperative to the government to ensure that the best quality health care is available to the people at large. It is essential to have good quality of the doctors coming out of the government and private medical institutions in order achieve best quality health care. The arms under the government is not sufficient to produce required number of doctors for the nation, also government cannot invest heavily for increasing government colleges to meet this gap. Hence the private organisations have been roped in to the medical educational field to meet the gap. At the same time it is essential to ensure that the private organisations produce good quality doctors. With the mushrooming of private medical institutions in our country whether the regulatory authorities are able to ensure that the government guidelines are followed by these college is highly debatable. If the regulatory authorities are able to regulate properly, why the press and medias are coming out with reports about the capitation racket in the private medical colleges. Even there were lot of court cases on this capitation fees issue and the Supreme Court has given a verdict in one of such case that the education institutions cannot be run as a business unit and it should not make profit. In this background the need for study the private medical institutions was taken up and lot of data has been collected from government and private authorities through Right to Information Act 2005. It has been brought out that the private medical colleges are not having proper evaluation procedure for admitting students in their colleges and most likely the admissions are carried by way of capitation fees. This paper has come out with lot of recommendation for reforming the medical education field so as to ensure that quality doctors are coming out of the Medical colleges in addition to the recommendation for the access and affordability to the quality healthcare.