The Myth of cost of spending on medical education needs to be made transparent.
Educating a doctor cost less what medical colleges claim- a global phenomenon.
Instead of often repeated statements about high expense on running medical college and projecting it as a hard fact, the amount spent on medical students by all medical colleges should be made transparent by all institutions. The frequent statement is made that cost of making a doctor is very high and gleefully propagated by the private medical colleges to extract millions out of young medical students .
Such statements without any actual public data is repeated to the extent that it is firmly entrenched in public mind without any real evidence.
High cost is the reason with an intention to exploit the young doctors in various ways to get cheap labour and extract millions from aspiring doctors by private medical colleges.
The basis of such calculation should be transparent for every medical college and all institutions.
In any medical college, only the Departments of Anatomy and Physiology are purely for medical students. The remaining subjects taught in medical colleges across the country are related to patient
care and medical education is only a by-product. All the medical teachers are actually doctors involved in treatment of patients, running the hospital and students observe the treatment and learn medicine. The interns and postgraduate students provide the cheap and labour and actually save the costs of running the hospital.
Therefore if some college is actually spending millions to produce one MBBS doctor , it is a either an inefficient model or costs are inflated and exaggerated to exploit the young doctors.
Educating a doctor cost less what medical colleges claim
The average cost of producing a doctor or nurse went down across most parts of the world between 2008 and 2018, but almost tripled in China and doubled in India, a Lancet study shows. Despite this, the estimated expenditure per medical graduate in China at $41,000 is higher only than in sub-Saharan Africa and about 42% lower than in India ($70,000) against a global average of $114,000. The pattern was the same for nurses with the estimated expenditure per nursing graduate dropping across the world while it went up by 167% in China and doubled in India. The only other region where the per graduate cost went up was in North Africa, where cost per doctor went up by 47% and by 25% for nurses. Approximately $110 billion was invested globally by governments and students’ families in medical and nursing education in 2018. Of this, $60.9 billion was invested in doctors and $48.8 billion was invested in nurses and midwives, the study estimated.
The paper looks at important developments in medical education to assess potential progress and issues with education of health professionals after the Covid-19 pandemic. Mean costs in 2018 were $114,000 per doctor and $32,000 per nurse. In 2008, China had the lowest estimated expenditure per medical graduate at just $14,000 (Rs 6 lakh) followed by India, where it was just $35,000 (Rs 15 lakh at the 2008 exchange rate of Rs 43 to a dollar). This is much lower than the estimate of Rs 1 crore or more that Indian colleges widely claim as expenditure per medical graduate.
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