Healthcare in India

The days of doctors’ prescriptions being parallel lines of illegible scrawls punctuated by the odd circle to indicate dosage, may soon be a thing of the past.

The executive committee of the Medical Council of India has decided that doctors should only write prescriptions in capital letters.

If the prescription also includes other remarks such as dietary advice or recommended tests, then at least the drug names and dosages should be written clearly in capitals, the committee has ruled.

Letters to this effect will soon be sent to all medical colleges, MCI chairperson Dr Jayshreeben Mehta told The Indian Express Monday.

“The executive committee has just passed this proposal. The committee unanimously felt that drug names and dosages are at times not clearly written in prescriptions causing a lot of confusion among both chemists and patients. That is why we have decided that all prescriptions should be in capital letters. Once the order comes out, it will be sent to all medical colleges,” Mehta said.

Committee members, sources said, made a strong pitch for all-caps prescriptions on the ground that misreading even a single letter can alter the name of a drug dramatically and lead to disastrous consequences for the patient. 

Doctors have welcomed the move but health ministry sources said they had no information about the decision.

more at http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/mci-tells-doctors-use-block-letters-when-you-write-prescriptions/

In a bizarre move, the Medical Council of India(MCI) — the apex regulatory body of doctors and the medical practice in the country — has decided to shrink its own jurisdiction. It has reinterpreted its code of ethics regulations as being applicable only to individual doctors and not doctors' associations. 

Clause 6.8 of the Code of Medical Ethics Regulation 2002 clearly states that it pertains to "code of conduct for doctors and professional association of doctors in their relationship with pharmaceutical and allied health sector industry". However, the executive committee of the new MCI in its meeting on February 18 decided that the term "association of doctors" be deleted from the clause. It went on to add that any action it took it against any association of doctors by virtue of clause 6.8 shall be nullified and that such proceedings would stand annulled. 

In effect, the MCI has stated that the action it took against the Indian Medical Association (IMA) for endorsing products of Pepsi and Dabur in exchanges for crores of rupees or against the Indian Academy of Paediatrics for accepting funding from pharmaceutical companies will no longer be valid. 

"It is a ridiculous position. The MCI itself had argued in an affidavit filed in the Delhi high court that what is prohibited for an individual doctor cannot be done by the doctor along with another bunch of doctors by forming an association," said Dr K V Babu, who had filed the original complaint against the IMA for endorsing products. 

Endorsement is expressly forbidden by the code of ethics, which says that no doctor ought to endorse any commercial product or drug or therapeutic article. In November 2010, the MCI had initiated action against officer bearers of the IMA on the endorsement issue. When one of the office bearers challenged the removal of his name from the medical register for six months before the high court, the MCI had argued in its affidavit that "...what is not allowed to be done directly cannot be permitted to be done indirectly".

more at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/MCI-shrinks-own-ambit-doctor-bodies-out-of-ethics-code/articleshow/30873980.cms