takers

CVTS

industry

fee

Medical

course

Even if you spend 12 years for a CVTS specialisation, you can’t operate on a patient directly. One has to wait for at least five years, assisting a surgeon, before being allowed to pick up a scalpel on your own — Dr V Devagourou, specialist and professor at CVTS department, AIIMS

Despite slashing its courseby almost 67 per cent this year, DY PatilCollege, Pune, has failed to attract a single candidate for its super-speciality stream — M Ch (Magister Chirurgiae or Master of Surgery) in Cardio Vascular and Thoracic Surgery (CVTS). This, the college officials insist, is a reflection of the national trend, with very few takers for theeven in other colleges.“We dropped the course fee from Rs 19.3 lakh to Rs 6.4 lakh as we were unable to find students for the stream,” informed DY Patil’s dean, Dr J S Bhawalkar. The college has also written to the Director General of Health Services at New Delhi to update the data on the Medical Counselling Committee’s (MCC) portal, so it reflects the heavily discounted fee.“The fee for the year 2018-19 has already been communicated to you with an online entry. Most of the CVTS seats are going vacant even in many government colleges,” Dr Bhawalkar’s letter pointed out. The letter also assured that residents in the programme will be paid stipend at par with state government rules. According to the state’s Director of Medical Education and Research, Dr Pravin Shingare, there are eight CVTS seats across the government colleges in the state.“The year before last one seat went vacant and last year two,” he informed.A senior officer of the college, on condition of anonymity, revealed, “The seats for CVTS have been going vacant for two years now. This prompted the management to shrink the fee to less than half of the consolidated fee last year. However, this too did not yield any result. Ours is not an isolated case. The situation is same pan-India.”MCC’s data supports this claim, revealing that 87 of the 131 seats across the country are going vacant this year. Dr Manoj Durairaj, executive committee member of the Indian Association of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgeons, said, “This has been the situation across the country for past three years, with very few enrolments in the course.” He blamed the trend on the medical students not willing to invest more time in attaining the super-specialisation.“They have to take up fellowships that stretch from two to four years. Pursuing a specific speciality will take another additional two years. This means by the time such a doctor completes his education, he is 35/36 years old. Then comes the struggle to prove oneself in the field. Most other medical students choosing other specialities get into practice at a much younger age. Such super-speciality requires passion and perseverance but most of the younger generation are in a hurry to settle down in life, so they choose not to make such selections,” he observed.Dr V Devagourou, specialist in complex cardiac surgery and professor at CVTS department of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, agreed that qualifying as such super-specialist is time-consuming. “Even if you spend 12 years to gain CTVS specialisation, you cannot operate on a patient directly. One has to wait for at least another five years, assisting an established surgeon before being allowed to pick up the scalpel on his or her own,” he said.With the younger lot turning their nose up at toiling after such super-speciality, the hospitals are struggling with the dearth of the skill. “While the young doctors are fighting shy of such pursuit, there is huge pool of patients queuing up for this super-speciality. In AIIMS complex heart surgeries are done for free or at subsidised rates. Patients have to wait for at least two years before getting operated. The waiting list has gone up to 2,024 patients, due to lack of such super-specialists,” Dr Devagourou added.