Doctors will soon start undergoing an assessment every after five years to determine whether they are still competent enough to treat patients.
Prof. Joel Okullo, the Chairperson of the Uganda Medical and Dental Practitioners Council (UMDPC)m says that they are still reviewing the nitty-gritty of how the exams will be held and when exactly they can start.
Also, in the plan, Okullo says is the Pre-entry exam for medical internship, which has long been protested by doctors since the first botched decision by the Ministry of Health in 2016. Then, the government argued that there was a huge number of medical students graduating but only a few were acquiring the necessary skills to practice medicine.
This seems to still be the case as Okullo notes that even as the number of graduating doctors is raising, they only have thirty-three training centers accredited and have only a few supervisors with some specialties lacking supervisors at all.
Since medical interns receive monthly payments, the government also argued that it was only cost-effective for them to sponsor those that can actually offer the service. Speaking to URN on Monday, Dr. Herbert Luswata, the General Secretary of the Uganda Medical Association, said they still don’t support this idea.
He said they already met President, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni over the issue and instead proposed a common final exam to be done by all medical schools like it is for those finalizing ordinary or advanced level education.
For him, a pre-entry exam for a person who has endured five years of training and the huge expense involved doesn’t make sense especially since the hidden intention to him is to reduce entry numbers into practice since the government cannot afford to employ all graduating doctors. With this proposed exam, he says there is likely to be malice.
Dr. Musa Lumumba, the President of the Federation of Medical Interns (FUMI) shares the same view, saying that internship is part of training and to improve quality government can only work to ensure that students acquire the skill they need right from the first years of medical school through supervising what is taught.
He notes that for the proposal of continuous assessment instead of doing it every five years, it would be ideal for an exam to be the basis for promotion to another level for instance senior medical officer, consultant, senior consultant, and the rest. He says the current process is subjective.
Meanwhile, as doctors still protest this, universities like Makerere have already introduced a pre-entry exam for those vying to become lawyers where they have to sit an exam introduced in the academic year 2012/2013 while joining the first year.
At the introduction of the exam, the argument was that there was a mismatch between Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) A-Level grades and the performance during the Bachelor of Laws program and legal practice.
Luswata says other than at the time of internship, the government would rather introduce the exam at the level of entry into medical school.
–URN
