Ethics on state medical council’s mind

Meeting after 12 yrs, elected body focuses on dumping obsolete procedures, forming ethics body

Ethics on state medical council's mind

Meeting after 12 yrs, elected body focuses on dumping obsolete procedures, forming ethics body

Self-discipline and ethical practice was the single-most important agenda on the minds of the freshly-elected council of the state's premier medical body Maharashtra Medical Council (MMC), which met on Saturday after a hiatus of 12 years.

MMC, which is the local arm of the Medical Council of India (MCI), is meant to self-regulate the medical fraternity and has sweeping powers right from issuing medical registrations to renewals and canceling registration of doctors for misconduct and even interfering in medical curriculum when necessary.

This body was mired in controversy and elections to the MMC council didn't take place for 12 years. As a result, there was no official body to regulate the medical fraternity or a watchdog to see that the fraternity behaved itself.

On Saturday, the first meeting of the MMC took place in Mumbai, where members stressed on the need to maintain ethical practice in medicine. "All members were concerned aboutu00a0 commercialism and unethical practice in medicine.
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That's why we unanimously agreed that we needed to crackdown on these incidents, especially those doctors who are advertising in newspapers or making tall claims about cures and other procedures.

Soon, we will have a separate committee to look into these cases," said Dr Sanjay Gupte, elected member of MMC council from the city.

Gupte said the second-most important decision was the formation of a state-level ethical committee within the MMC.

"The committee will form within a month. All cases and complaints related to unethical practice right from overcharging to false claims and even misguidance will be handled by the committee.

So far, there are about 450 complaints made by people in the past about medical negligence or over-charging, among others, by patients. Our first priority is to dispose off these cases," said Gupte.

The council has also decided to make the process of registration and renewal of doctors an online process. On a daily basis, over 100 doctors submit their licenses for renewal which becomes cumbersome as they have to visit the MMC office in Parel, Mumbai.

"Soon a website will be started for this and we will verify if the skills of the doctors have been updated or not before renewal of licences," he said.