Chennai |HL
The medical council of Tamil Nadu will issue show-cause notices to 48 doctors asking why action including cancellation of medical licence cannot be initiated against them for misleading the council. These doctors registered themselves as postgraduates in emergency medicine although their degrees weren’t recognised by the Medical Council of India.
“The state council will also initiate an internal inquiry to find out if there was any official nexus involved,” its president Dr K Senthil said. “The council was being administered by a retired judge as there were no elected members. We will find out if anyone within the council helped them,” he said.
If the disciplinary committee finds the doctors guilty, the council may cancel their PG registration or even ban them from practice and council staff may be suspended or dismissed. In addition, the council has put at least 15 more applications for registration on hold until it completes the inquiry.
The doctors hold postgraduate degrees from two deemed universities — Sree Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute and Vinayaka Mission Medical College – which got letters of permission to start the postgraduate course in emergency medicine with two seats each in 2013 and 2012 respectively.
But 48 postgraduates in accident and emergency medicine registered their degree as just emergency medicine. State medical council officials said the doctors included 40 from Sri Ramachandra University from who registered themselves between October and December last year.
“They have all completed their course between 2004-2011. We shouldn’t have registered them but we were misled,” said a senior official in the council. At least 20 of them passed out in 2009, the year when emergency medicine was first recognised as a postgraduate specialty in India.
The MCI became aware of this after a doctor’s body made a complaint based on information sourced from an RTI application.
