J&K gets 265 more medical seats

New Delhi, November 8

In sync with Prime Minister’s vision of ‘Health for All’, the government has granted 265 Diplomate of National Board (DNB) postgraduate medical seats to several government hospitals in J&K across 20 districts.

The step will not only benefit the J&K people, but also the doctors as they will also get an opportunity of being trained in their own region, a health ministry statement said. Tapping into this homegrown medical workforce would lead to an effective healthcare delivery system in the UT, it said.

“With the vision of providing trained specialists in almost every district of J&K, the government took this as a challenge in a mission mode,” read the statement.

“The Ministry of Health along with National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) took a lead role and ensured that several postgraduate seats of NBEMS are granted to various government hospitals of Jammu and Kashmir,” it said.

As a consequence, at present there exist more than 250 PG seats across 20 districts in phase 1 of the expansion plan. Two more PG seats will be granted in the second phase. Fifty per cent of the PG seats are reserved for local in-service doctors to provide them with the opportunity for postgraduate training.

The people in the Union Territory will be benefited as modern quality healthcare will become more affordable and accessible in almost all the districts. This in turn, would further enhance the quality of primary, secondar, and tertiary healthcare, the statement said.

The government has also increased the number of examination centres in the UT to ensure that the candidates do not have to travel to other states to appear in the entrance examinations, the statement said.