Bengaluru: Three medical colleges in the state, which tried to pass off healthy people as patients during an inspection by the Medical Council of India (MCI) and falsely claimed to have improved their facilities, have been barred from admitting students to their MBBS courses for the next two academic years.
The inspectors found that 17 patients admitted to the paediatrics ward of the Sambharam Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Kolar, were from an orphanage and had minor complaints that did not merit admission. And while the inspectors found hardly any patients at around 11 a.m at the institute, their numbers swelled dramatically later as it admitted healthy people into its other wards as well.
The MCI team also found that although no actual operations were conducted, the data of the institute's operation theatre register was manipulated to show otherwise. Besides the Sambharam Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, the other institutes in the dock are Akash Medical College, Devanahalli and Shridevi Institute of Medical Sciences (SIMS), Tumakuru.
The three colleges were given conditional approval for admitting 150 students to the first year of their MBBS course in 2016-17 after they claimed in an undertaking that they had rectified all deficiencies in their facilities as required by the Union Health Ministry and Supreme Court mandated Oversight Committee (OC).
But finding their claims to be untrue, the OC recommended that they be barred from admitting students for the next two years as they were still "grossly deficient" in facilities, according to the minutes of the MCI's Executive Committee (EC) meeting held on January 13 this year.
