The Importance of PM Education in the Medical Curriculum

Dr. Deepa Bhide, PMP is a physician and currently an independent healthcare IT and project management consultant. She has a postgraduate degree in Pediatrics and Neonatology from the University of Health Sciences, India. Deepa is an advocate of using project management in healthcare and related domains. She has worked extensively in the confluence of clinical medicine, IT and project management domains with hands-on experience in managing projects from conception to closure.

  Healthcare   Using PMI Standards  

India perhaps has one of the largest medical systems in the world. According to the 2014 figures from the Medical Council of India (MCI), there are a total of 409 medical colleges producing approximately 49,940 medical graduates and 25,000 postgraduates every year.

This is a large number considering the impact of the changes that medical curriculum can have on their training and the eventual need of the community. The medical curriculum is comprised of 13 subjects at an undergraduate level, and so far is spread over 4.5 years of classroom and hospital training--and a year of rotating internship. With a large pool of patients and educationists, medical education in India is one of the best in the world.

In recent years, however, the usefulness of the education has been questioned and contested. This is a result of the gaps in skills that are reported in delivering the core service, when the students are faced a real-world scenario of managing a patient. The committee supervising the medical coursework has reacted to this by redesigning the existing curriculum a few times.

Modification to the course was done as part of an effort by a consortium of medical colleges, governors of MCI and other stakeholders. That has not helped change the situation a whole lot though--the gaps in the current system exist in spite of the multiple revisions. The ultimate goal of medical …

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