No Medical Qualification With 57.3 Per Cent Personnel Currently Practicing Allopathy, Says Health Ministry

On the lines of a 2016 report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that 57.3 per cent of medical personnel practicing allopathy in India did not have any medical qualification, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has now issued a press release saying the same.

The government had earlier rubbished the WHO findings as per a report by the Economic Times.

“The report is erroneous since MBBS is the minimum qualification for enrolment as registered medical practitioner in a state medical register to practise medicine, and hence all registered doctors have medical qualifications,” the then Health Minister J P Nadda had said in a reply in the Lok Sabha on 5 January, 2018.

Nadda had also said that the “the primary responsibility to deal with such cases of quacks lie with the respective state government.”

In its press release, the government had said that there is a huge skew in the distribution of doctors working in the urban and rural areas with the urban to rural doctor density ratio being 3.8:1. Hence there was a need to rely upon a cadre of specially trained mid-level providers who can lead the Health and Wellness Centres for an interim period, until new professionals can be trained.