The Union Health Ministry's much-delayed and much-awaited plan to e-network Government medical colleges across the country with an aim to use technology for meeting faculty shortage, is inching ahead, though at a snail pace.
Under the first phase, the Ministry has finally identified a firm to e-network fifty Government medical colleges including the new six
AIIMS — at Raipur, Jodhpur, Bhopal, Rishikesh, Patna and Bhubaneswar — including the one at Delhi wherein classroom teaching would be possible through distance teaching methods with the use of technology.
The All India Medical College Tele-Medicine Network is part of the Ministry's Centrally Sponsored Scheme (CSS) approved way back in 2014.
"The facilities under this project comprise of telemedicine services, virtual classroom/digital lecture theatre, lecture sharing, remote participation and skill sharing among health professionals among other e-learning services," said a senior official from the Ministry.
The Ministry hopes that the networking of all the fifty medical colleges will complete within next six months enabling faculties from big institutes to mentor online the students of the colleges devoid of teachers in that stream.
The Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPI) at lucknow will function as a national resources centre (NRC) where infrastructure to execute the job has already been installed.
The official said that inspite of the presence of all the regulatory mechanisms, barring few, most of the medical colleges across the country are grossly lacking competent teachers, well stocked library leave aside adequate teaching material, poor infrastructure and quality of teachers are hampering the medical colleges.
later on, under this initiative, a hub of doctors for primary consultation and a virtual layer of specialty/ super specialty doctors for specialty consultation from these 50 medical colleges would be created for providing "online medical consultation" and tele-follow up facility to citizens which will be similar to OPD facility but in a virtual way through a video-conferencing enabled web-portal.