All medical graduates should be offered diploma courses to make them specialists

Central Council of Homeopathy can also think in this line .

New Delhi: To tide over the acute shortage of medical specialists in India, the country needs medical educational institutions on the line of the College of Physicians and Surgeons (CPS) in Maharashtra which would offer diploma courses to medical graduates, according to experts.

Talking about the acute shortage of medical specialists in the country, Dr Devi Shetty, founder and chairman, Narayana Health, recently pointed out that while the US has 19,000 undergraduate medical seats and 32,000 postgraduate seats, in India it is the opposite – the country has close to 50,000 undergraduate medical seats but only 14,000 PG seats.

“The low number of PG seats results in a shortage of specialists. This can have terrible consequences on the ground. For example, India has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world and this is unrelated to the amount of money we spend on healthcare. The reason is that we have created a regulatory structure where only a specialist can perform certain tasks, and the country simply doesn’t produce enough of these specialists,” he said.

Calling for major changes in the existing health system, Dr Naresh Trehan, chairman and managing director, Global Health (Medanta-The Medicity), said, “Healthcare is basically disease management. We should build our system from the ground up to create a new blueprint of India’s healthcare.”

“We have over 800,000 ASHAs (Accredited Social Healthcare Activists) in India but they are ill trained and don’t have any medical skills. Their costs are a huge burden on the exchequer and nothing gets accomplished in return. [Source]