Hyderabad: The government medical school rolled up under severe manpower tightening, and the hospital operated for several days without interns. Despite the internships completed in 2019, the 2020 batch is still waiting for results, and the hospital is still facing a serious shortage of frontline medical staff despite the examinations ending in early February.
The delay in announcing results also highlights students preparing for NEET PG and other graduate exams. As the internship began, they were concerned about the delay in the academic process.
“The interns joined in 2017 have been delayed until July. In the past two years, it began on April 1 itself. This year, it was mid-April and has not yet announced results for the second and final year MBBS batch. The results for the third year have been released,” said the final student of Kakatia Medical College.
“Of courses of 34 medical schools in the state, only seven interns can handle patient inflows. The rest are new colleges, whose first batches have not yet completed the MBBS program. The last year students of these seven seven colleges are also unable to start their internships due to announcements of delayed results,” the student said.
As the final year results of MBBS were put on hold due to delays in paper inspections, new interns have not yet joined, resulting in a shortage of staff in the relevant hospitals. More than 120 interns at each university are unable to join, which creates overload of residents, who work more than 70 hours a week.
Dr Pranay Motte, a senior resident of Nizamabad Government Hospital, explained: “Junior doctors and interns make up 70% of the workforce in government hospitals and are ground workers in medical facilities. Without them, senior residents have to deal with a large inflow of patients.”
He said the hospital has about 80 residents. “In the summer, the inflow of patients is about 800-1,000, and there are about 200 hospitalized patients. With about 120 interns, residents have to overwork. One person can extend it for about a week, but after that, everyone is exhausted.”
Interns are essential to dealing with core clinical responsibilities, from performing life-saving procedures to assisting with surgery and patient management. They handle a lot of workloads every day in wards, emergency rooms, labor rooms and ICUs. Their absence now directly affects the patient’s workload allocation and management.
At RIMS in Adilabad, the situation is similar, with only 65 residents processing about 900 outpatients and 100 inpatients per day. About 120 interns have not joined the hospital.
“There are no interns in the state of Telangana,” said a resident doctor at Gandhi Medical College. “The duties of the casualties, ICU and wards are severely hindered. We are understaffed and burdened. The new batch has been tested for more than two months, but paper corrections are still under trial.”
Gandhi Medical College is waiting for 250 interns to join. Osmania Medical College and Kakatiya Medical College are expected to have about 300 and 250 interns, respectively.
“Many senior residents from the Para clinical department were sent to the casualties due to the lack of dedicated casualty medical staff (CMOs). This is not sustainable,” said Dr. Karshini, a senior resident of Gandhi Medical College. In addition, no allowance has been received from senior residents so far.
While a handful of Foreign Medicine Graduates (FMG), Extended Interns and Cited Interns are helping each university 20-30, it is not enough to manage the work of the hospital.
Officials suggest that final MBB results may be announced later this week or early next week
