This August, undergraduate medical students across India will come into class to study a syllabus that has been revised after over two decades. Touted as a unique curriculum patented by the Medical Council of India (MCI), this “living document”, which means that it is open to review and revision as required, is currently in its final lap of preparation before it is implemented.
Hectic preparation is on with the core group of 40,000 medical teachers — previously trained by the MCI — ensuring the “last group” training for teachers in individual colleges. “This is a massive exercise in itself,” said a senior MCI official.
The group has been trained to teach the new components, including ethics, clinical exposure, inter-department co-ordination (teaching the same topic simultaneously), skill enhancement modules and a new foundation bridge course for graduates. “Teachers also have to be alert to the annual revision, which will include changing laws, new diseases, discoveries and updated research information,” said Dr. Avinash N. Supe, member of the expert group of the MCI’s academic cell.
But not all teachers are happy with the updated syllabus, pointing to several critical omissions.
“The syllabus isn’t wholesome and inclusive,” said Dr. Satendra Singh, disability activist and medical doctor at the University College of Medical Sciences and Guru Tegh Bahadur Hospital, Delhi.
“Disability competencies for health professionals are missing from the document. The importance of empathetic non-verbal communication and unique medical problems associated with patients with disabilities has to be part of the new syllabus. Despite our submissions, after extensive consultation with stakeholders, we are taken aback by the fact that there is no mention of it in the actual document,” he said.
‘Outdated, dangerous’
Adds Dr. Zakirhusain Shaikh, Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, Hamdard Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Jamia Hamdard, Delhi: “Having an outdated medical curriculum is not just dangerous and life-threatening but also illegal when it doesn’t conform to the legislation and judicial orders of the land.” He added that the new syllabus was gender-sensitive.
Dr. Shaikh said that, recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) has changed the term Gender Identity Disorder (GID) to Gender Incongruence, and removed it from the category of mental disorders, but, “This hasn’t been catered to in this new syllabus. Similarly, the American Psychiatric Association has also discarded the term GID and adopted Gender Dysphoria. Why then is the MCI still stuck with GID is baffling.”
He added, “The entire document doesn’t mention the word transgender even once, forget about including any other guidelines for transgender health. It still has in the curriculum, under the heading of ‘sexual offences’. Transvestism is described as sexual perversion. All this when Section 377 regarding unnatural sexual offences and Section 497 regarding adultery have been termed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.”
