Telangana: District Residency Program is mandatory for all PG medicos

The clinical responsibilities of the PG doctors would be to provide their services at inpatient and outpatient departments, casualty or emergency facilities and be available for duties during the night time.

Hyderabad: To strengthen super-specialty healthcare services in districts, as a part of District Residency Program (DRP), it has now become mandatory for all the Post Graduate medical students pursuing PG degree and diploma courses in both private and government teaching hospitals to be deputed to government district hospitals in Telangana.

The PG doctors from broad specialties would be posted for three months on rotation basis in district hospitals to ensure quality care was available to patients there and they need not have to travel to Hyderabad to access specialty healthcare at Gandhi Hospital, OGH and NIMS. This would also ensure that a broad specialty doctor is available throughout the year for the patients in the districts.

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Apart from district hospitals, the super-specialty PG doctors can also be posted at Community Health Centres (CHC), Primary Health Centres (PHC), sub-centres, Urban Health Centres and even community healthcare systems that are engaged in providing public healthcare services of both the State and the Centre to patients in smaller towns, the National Medical Commission (NMC) in its latest guidelines on DRP, said.

The clinical responsibilities of the PG doctors would be to provide their services at inpatient and outpatient departments, casualty or emergency facilities and be available for duties during the night time. In case specialist doctors were not available to guide PG medical students in the district hospitals or other such lower-level healthcare facilities, then the PG medicos work under the overall guidance of District Residency Program Coordinator (DRPC) to be appointed by the health department.

The NMC in its guidelines, which were released a couple of days ago, urged the State governments to provide appropriate amenities to the district residents including proper accommodation preferably within the campus of the district healthcare facility or nearby, transportation facility to the hospital if living quarters were far away and security especially for women resident doctors. The training of the district residents in the healthcare facilities would be monitored.

The mandatory district residency program is being implemented as part of the Post Graduate Medical Education Regulations 2000 (PGMER-2000).