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Medical, dental courses admissions: BFUHS to hold additional round to fill vacant seats
As a significant number of postgraduate medical courses and undergraduate dental courses’ seats are lying vacant in Punjab medical and dental colleges, Baba Farid University of Health Sciences on Wednesday announced to hold an additional fifth round of counselling to fill these seats.
As a significant number of postgraduate (PG) medical courses and undergraduate (UG) dental courses’ seats are lying vacant in Punjab medical and dental colleges, Baba Farid University of Health Sciences (BFUHS) on Wednesday announced to hold an additional fifth round of counselling to fill these seats.
After four rounds of counselling by the medical varsity, 616 seats of bachelor of dental sciences (BDS), 80 seats of doctor of medicine (MD) and master of surgery (MS) courses and 10 seats of Master of Dental Surgery (MDS) are remaining vacant in the state medical and dental colleges.
The medical varsity in a notice said that in consonance to the approval of the ministry of health and family welfare and directions issued by the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC), physical counselling for special stray vacancy round for admission to PG courses under NEET PG-2022 and second mop-up round for BDS courses under NEET UG-2022 will be held on January 13 at BFUHS, Faridkot.
As per Medical Counselling Committee (MCC) after the completion of four rounds of PG counselling 2022, a total of 2244 MD, MS and PG diploma and 62 MDS seats remained vacant across the country. The competent authority decided to hold a special stray vacancy round to fill the vacant seats.
Despite the cut-off being lowered by 25 percentile for each category for admissions to postgraduate courses, of the total 544 state quota seats of PG and PG diploma courses in three government and four private medical colleges, 82 seats are vacant after four rounds of counselling. As many as 80 (63%) of the total 126 non-clinical branches MD seats and two PG diploma seats were declared vacant.
The non-clinical subjects include anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, microbiology and community medicine. “Two years back, after the outbreak of Covid, there was a demand for microbiology branch. But this demand has once again declined,” said a BFUHS official.
Experts in the medical education field said the response and demand for non-clinical courses, including anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, microbiology and community medicine, was coming down and this year it had slipped further.
After four rounds of counselling, as many as 616 of the 1,330 BDS seats at Punjab’s 16 dental colleges were also left vacant. The figures are so far highest in past decade as for the 10th year in a row, private dental colleges in the state have failed to fill the BDS seats.
With almost every second BDS seat vacant, of 1,240 seats in 14 private colleges, 616 are vacant (50%). However, all 90 seats in the government dental colleges at Amritsar and Patiala were filled. Of the total colleges, 11 private colleges, having 100 seats each, have failed to fill even 50% BDS seats. To fill the vacant seats, the university had held a stray vacancy counselling round last month, however, only 16 eligible candidates showed up during the counselling.
