News reaching this publication indicates that the Ministry of Health is in the process of introducing standardised pre-entry internship exams to all medical interns before they are deployed to hospitals across the country.
According to Daily Monitor, the exams are expected to address the public concerns over the deteriorating quality of medical interns from training institutions.
The Ministry of Health plan is contained in a new draft policy where proposals have been discussed and is soon being forwarded to Cabinet before it is taken to Parliament for consideration.
The Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health, Dr Diana Atwine, said the new policy is geared towards streamlining medical training and improving service delivery in the health sector.
“We are looking at it from the time the candidate is selected, admitted in institutions of training and how the training must be done. The requirements for the entry are going to be revised. We are also looking at numbers because now, we allowed so many students and when you have quantitative, normally you lose the qualitative,” Dr Atwine said.
She added: “So, we want to focus on the policies bringing back the quality of the product that we produce as a country but also specifically on training. We are also discussing on the exams, how they’re going to be structured on assessment of the quality of the trainees. All those are key areas that we are going to look at.”
Dr Atwine was presenting her key note address yesterday at the ongoing Joint Annual Scientific Health Conference 2023, taking place at Imperial Royal Hotel in Entebbe.
It should be noted that in June, the Health ministry said it needed Shs80.4 billion to facilitate the deployment of 1,901 medical interns, who were then still waiting to undertake the training and 4,000 pre-intern medical doctors who are about to finish studies.
More details to be availed.
