New Delhi, May 20: Undergraduate medical students across India may need to spend more time in rural areas under a proposal being examined by the Medical Council of India (MCI) that may extend the duration of the 5.5-year MBBS programme.

The MCI, in consultation with the Union health ministry, was examining a proposal to add several months to the current three-month rural training, which is mandatory during MBBS internship, said K.K. Talwar, chairman of the MCI board.

Talwar told The Telegraph that the MCI had asked a panel of experts to determine how students could be “mentored, monitored, and supervised” during these additional months, while they were attached to the government health centres.

He said the exact additional period students would have to spend in rural health centres was yet to be determined, but it could be anything between six months to a year.

“This is intended to be part of their training programme — it’s important to give the MBBS students a feel of the (rural) country,” Talwar said. The panel of experts examining the proposal was likely to issue its recommendations within a few weeks, he said.

Another member of the MCI board told The Telegraph that the additional rural training and the increase in the duration of internship was a “possible avenue to improve rural healthcare” under exploration, but “still at a primitive stage of discussions”.

Senior members of the medical education sector believe the proposal is likely to encounter some opposition from sections of medical colleges, particularly private colleges, that may not wish to extend the duration of the MBBS course.

Some are already dubbing the proposal as a “gimmick” that will not make any significant difference to healthcare services in the rural areas.

“All this will achieve is to get raw and usually reluctant students to spend more of token time in the rural areas,” said Kunchala Shyamprasad, a cardiothoracic surgeon and a former member of a Union health ministry’s task force on medical education.

“Instead, the MCI and the government should speed up the already-approved proposal to introduce the alternative undergraduate course to create a cadre of rural health providers, open exclusively to the rural residents,” Shyamprasad said.

The government has expressed its support for such a three-year course leading to such an alternative medical education programme, whose graduates are expected to be more willing to serve in rural areas than MBBS graduates.

Under the existing MBBS programme, students have to complete a year of internship after four-and-a-half years of college study, and three months of this year are spent in a community health department that often involves a posting in rural areas.

In a letter to the MCI, the health ministry has asked its board of governors to make rural posting for doctors mandatory and include it in the MBBS course curriculum.

Health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said doctors would be attached with the ministry’s flagship National Rural Health Mission during the rural posting.