Reforming Medical Curriculum in India in Recent Years

Abstract

India has the largest medical education system in the world with 335 medical schools producing about 40,000 medical graduates every year. Most medical schools follow the traditional discipline based medical curricula with division of course into pre-clinical, para-clinical, and clinical phases spread over four and a half years followed by one year of internship. The relevance of training to the societal needs has often been questioned. Attempts have been made repeatedly at reforming the undergraduate curricula and, less frequently, the post graduate medical curricula. Though curricular innovations have been initiated and institutionalized in few medical schools in India over the past two decades, repeated attempts to bring about change at a national level have not met with success. In this paper, the authors share the various conflicts that were often observed during such curriculum reform initiatives and strategies to resolve these conflicts.