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Patna, Feb. 17: Over 40 per cent of the seats for faculty members at Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (IGIMS) are vacant even as a team of Medical Council of India (MCI) is slated to visit the institute shortly.
Sources said the acute shortage of medical teachers in the state could pose a serious threat to the institution from getting the renewal of MCI permission for a medical college this year. The wait for the sanction for appointment of faculty members at IGIMS continues.
“An MCI team was supposed to inspect IGIMS today and tomorrow. However, the visit has been deferred by a few days. There are apprehensions that their inspection might lose its recognition,” a senior official at IGIMS told The Telegraph, adding that the threat is more serious as over 40 per cent of the seats at the health hub are vacant.
He said while 96 posts have been proposed in the ranks of professor, associate professor, assistant professor and tutor, there are about 50 of them in the college, while the remaining posts are yet to be sanctioned by the health department.
Last year, the medical colleges at IGIMS, a 450-bed tertiary care health hub, was approved for a 100-seat medical college by the MCI under Section 10A of MCI Act (Amended) with an “autonomous” tag on the condition that the “permission will be renewed on a yearly basis on the verification of achievement of annual target as mentioned in the project report submitted by the institution”.
Experts said the requisite number of faculty is a must for continuing the medical college, which has such a huge intake of medical students. The conditional permission also specified that the process of annual renewal of permission would continue till the time the establishment of medical college and expansion of hospital facilities are completed according to MCI norms.
Senior officials at IGIMS said the Centre had “somehow managed to start the first batch of MBBS course with requisite infrastructure, resources and faculty but the facilities needed to expanded for the batches this year onwards.
According to the MCI standards, an institution needs at least 25 acres and University Grants Commission (UGC) recognition besides the adequate number of medical staff to start the MBBS course. The institution’s plan to convert it into a 500-bed hospital — a must for a medical college with a capacity of 100 students — is stuck because of lack of funds at present.
“The state government approved a Rs 550-crore detailed project prepared by a private consultant for a complete revival of the facility,” a health department official said.
He added: “The state government also recommended 500 more beds, outpatient department, intensive care unit (ICU) among other facilities for the modern centre for the medical college and healthcare. However, as of now only Rs 25 crore has been released.”
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