“Let’s not produce substandard doctors – ‘many’ docs but ‘poor’ healthcare”

Prof. Gominda Ponnamperuma urges strict regulation of medical education

Underscoring that any country including Sri Lanka needs doctors, the President of the College of Medical Educationists, Prof. Gominda Ponnamperuma, pointed out that doctors, however, cannot work in a vacuum.

“Doctors need other healthcare professionals and infrastructure facilities to engage in meaningful patient care. So, increasing the doctor population in the name of increasing patient care, without considering the rest of the healthcare landscape is a lopsided exercise,” he said.

Explaining that unlike other commercial commodities, medical education should not be demand driven, he was quick to point out that it should be need/ supply driven. Just because there is a demand for medical education, opening up medical schools without analysing the need to produce doctors, would give rise to a paradoxical situation where there are many doctors but poor healthcare.

“If medical schools (private or public) are opened without paying due consideration to the resources (both human and physical) necessary to produce competent doctors, it would lead to substandard patient care. Human resources or teaching staff are the most hard to generate in the short term. This is while even though the country is cash-strapped, increasing physical resources is relatively easier than increasing human resources,” he said.

Prof. Ponnamperuma stressed that producing substandard doctors due to lack of resources would have dire healthcare consequences. The calamity that we see and hear when a few drugs are substandard would get augmented several fold, if the prescribers of 'all' drugs become substandard.

“The only way to prevent the deterioration of medical education and degradation of patient care is to lay down clear guidelines on minimum standards that every medical school should comply with and closely monitor the process of delivering medical education in these schools,” he said, urging the strict regulation of medical education from the very beginning to the end, as an ongoing process.

He was categorical that the regulation should start at the conceptual stage of establishing a new medical school – many months/years before the admission of students to a new medical school.

“For, if the country earns a bad reputation over substandard medical education, that will jeopardize the government's efforts of making Sri Lanka an education hub, as no foreign student would come to a country that offers poor education,” added Prof. Ponnamperuma.