CMC Vellore comes to city with distance course for GPs

Sunday April 20, 2008

Published in The Financial Express

The Christian Medical College (CMC) Vellore has launched a distance-education programme to help general practitioners keep up with the latest trends in medicine and treatment.

CMC has tied up with 10 hospitals in Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Thiruvanthapuram, Tezpur and Odenchetram, for making them centres of distance learning.

Dr. Akjana, associate director of  CMC, Vellore, said that in India there are more than 250,000 general practitioners who have no opportunity to take up post-graduate courses and therefore such doctors are not aware of modern methodology of medecines and modalities of treatment.

This increases the number of referral cases of simple health ailments to bigger hospitals, which actually should have been successfully treated in smaller clinics or block level health centers, Jana said.  

The distance course, dealing with 75 modules for 80 different ailments would build the capacity of general practitioners to manage more cases so that referral becomes less necessary.  This would ultimately benefit the financially weaker patients, Jana said.  

 The CMC is offering a two-year Post Graduate Diploma in Family Medicine (PGDFM) accredited by the Indira Ghandi National Open University (IGNOU).

Jana said that although a team of twelve would run the course initially across all the 10 centres, having a maximum of 25-30 students in each, it would spread out by absorbing the trained students as educators in their local centers.  

 The CMC is also thinking of offering the distance course to doctors in the government's block and subdivisional health centres and hospitals.

In Kolkata, CMC has tied up with Mercy Hospital for the course.