Should our doctors be put through innumerable CETs?

Dr Govind Hoskeri

The Taj Bengal was the venue for meritorious students, receiving prizes for securing seats in the engineering and medical colleges. These students were a little different. They had toiled under the streetlights, literally burnt the midnight streetlamps, as they could not afford the usual lights. Their being felicitated in the ‘five star limelight’ was marred by the fact that they had to be ushered in through the backdoors of the Taj Bengal. The reason was that they had no shoes to wear and the dress code did not allow this ungainly sight. This happening in a state run by communism... what a way to celebrate class difference...may be the plans are afoot to bring in bare foot doctors on the lines of China... will all the dress code conscious establishments not allow the barefoot M F Hussain too...

When these students come out of their rural upbringings and graduate, they will have to face yet another variety of communism. This is imposed on them by the Common Entrance Tests. They have no choice but to accept the branch and the college where they are going to peruse postgraduate studies. Even at the undergraduate level this Common Entrance Test mode of admissions are questionable. The attitude and the aptitudes of the students have taken a back seat. At least when they are planning postgraduate studies these should be considered.

This attains a grotesque proportion when the super specialty selections are also going to be determined by the Common Entrance Tests. This much for the freedom of choosing to be educated!

That there is no alternative is just an excuse. We have experts telling about the aptitude tests. We have kindergarten admissions where a psychiatrist forms one of the members of interview committee, interviewing the kids and the parents, which is probably the most grueling entrance exam of all.

When it comes to admissions in medical colleges why should we suffer from all possible excuses? We need to evolve a different approach. If we do not do so in the near future, it will be too late. As far as the seats available on donation for postgraduate studies, the less said the better. When will the policy makers realize that it is the common man who is going to suffer on account of all these issues?

In Maharashtra the guard has changed. Will it have a solution to the students suffering on account of the failure of compulsory AMOship started with a view to entice the doctors to take up a career in the rural areas of India? As a fresh batch of interns is facing the prospect of spending the next year doing nothing, as there is no money to fund AMO ships, what initiatives are being taken to address this problem? Most of them will be preparing for the CET exams and await the results. “Is AMOship likely to be made compulsory after post graduation” is a question that is making the rounds. With the prospect of losing a very crucial year in their life, they are not even aware of what it means to lose one year, in a doctor’s life.

I am offering, in this hopeless situation, a solution. Marry. At least it will give them a year to get used to being wanted, being loved and brings in a little cheer to the already existing longest possible holiday mood, if we go by the saying that the marriages are made in heaven. Even otherwise, it will be an experience for which they usually had to wait till the mid-thirties. Either ways it will be a blessing in disguise, as it is going to keep them away from the communistic designs of modern medical experimentations. They will have a chance to see the good things in life at least a decade earlier. This is perhaps the god sent opportunity that is knocking at their doors.

Come on you fellas, there is more to life than being a doctor and purely wasting one year on CET alone. If proved successful, this idea is going to catch like wildfire. The wedlock will make them more responsible, hopefully. What started as a pilot affair to induce the young doctors into settling in villages had to be shelved so early and tht too without offering any solutions at all. I am forced to write once again on this issue, as no one is even showing an inclination to solve this deadlock (wedlock as suggested by me is a temporary solution, purely applicable to individuals who are inclined to) and year after year it becomes difficult for us to see an entire year being just deleted from the younger generation of doctors. In their youthful zest, this one-year may be considered by them as ‘breathing period’ in their grueling years of training. That is the saddest part of the show.

That it provides ample time to prepare for the Entrance exams is a poor argument. The amount of experience that they are losing in one year is something phenomenal that cannot be replaced at any cost. Is there anyone listening to...may be they are too busy arranging the birthday bashes...why not these bashes be taken to the rural sides where the fields are lush green (?) and the food is five star fresh along with clean potable water... and if something untoward happens in these serene surroundings to the VIP guests, these youthful ‘doctors in abeyance’ (I have restrained myself by not using the words like ‘suspended animation’ meaning almost paralyzed to death) will find some useful jobs to take care of their personal needs at the very least count. They were, as AMOs, assured of a pay packet of around 14000 rupees per month.

I tried to talk to some of the people concerned with the Pharma industry. May be they could use this almost one year of the youthful doctors to assist them in their primary Research and Development set ups. So far my limited encounters with them have fallen on deaf years. There are two ways to look at this business proposition. The doctors are available on a ‘continuous change pattern’.

They can easily be trained to carry out simple tasks. This will in turn give them a first hand exposure to one of the biggest industries world over.

The companies will benefit by the fact that the doctors will be ‘brand faithful’ to the brands of the companies who have come forward to help them in this hour of crisis. May be it is a long-term investment but certainly worth giving a trial.

Wake up ye managers you are catching the doctors at their impressionable best, which unfortunately is also the most vulnerable time in their life. My only request to the temporary employers is that these students be treated with dignity and allowed ample time to prepare for their exams also. Pre CET months can be used to train them and post CET months can be utilized in recovering the investment. I would appreciate this apprenticeship if it can start as on date as today itself. May be a giant manager to the
Pharma industry be born in this endeavor.

I am confident of my skills at communication. Yet why is it that some of the Pharma people I have been talking to, have not come forward positively to this suggestion baffles me. Probably I have been giving this advice free of cost. Hope that this suggestion through these columns at least will have some impact.

One of them had a brilliant idea. These doctors can be employed to collect the literature and other advertising material of rival companies. Please do not do that.

This is not what I call ‘useful employment’. Some of them may be so compromised by the circumstances that they may opt for such suicidal offers also. Please, once again I repeat, do not do that. If we can not come up with any constructive ways to address this problem, we could keep on ‘writing off’ this issue, fifty years hence, as we have been doing now with reference to rural health care as. Long live rural health care, it has survived, just as it was fifty years back.