The Central University of Kerala (CUK) here has requested civil society bodies and elected representatives to join a delegation it proposes to take to New Delhi to facilitate the setting up of a postgraduate medical college, with added thrust on research activities, in the district.
CUK Vice Chancellor G. Gopakumar, who had mooted the idea of taking a high-level delegation to New Delhi in 2015, said the university had come out with a proposal to set up a state-of-the-art medical college to impart postgraduate courses in various medical streams by giving more focus to research.
The institution would work like any other medical college where patients could seek treatment. However, the college would not go for undergraduate courses such as MBBS and BDS, Dr. Gopakumar said. It would be a full-fledged advanced institute with amenities of other medical colleges. The institute would have a dedicated Epidemiology Department that would study the distribution and determinants of health and disease conditions in defined populations.
Support
However, the idea was yet to take a definite shape as only a few political party leaders and civil society bodies had expressed willingness to be part of the endeavour, he said. More resourceful persons needed to join the initiative to convince the Centre and exert pressure to set up such an institute here, he said.
Though hundreds of endosulfan victims in Kasaragod are suffering from traumatic and undiagnosed diseases, the district is yet to have a medical college. Local people are forced to rely on hospitals in Mangaluru for expert medical care. The works on the proposed government medical college hospital (MCH) near Badiadukka are yet to commence with the State citing fund crunch as the reason for the delay. The project was launched four years ago by the previous UDF government. V. Gopinathan, former Principal of Government College, Kasaragod, and president of the Kasaragod People’s Forum, which had evinced keen interest in the initiative, said that Dr. Gopakumar had shared the idea with P. Karunakaran, MP, and Revenue Minister E. Chandrasekharan during a meeting in 2016.
