Uncertainty looms over Foreign Medical Graduates for permanent registration

After thousands of foreign medical graduates returned to India during the Covid pandemic, these medical professionals are facing uncertainty because of the internship period to get their permanent registration in the country. These doctors have sought the health ministry’s intervention to get permanent registration from different state medical councils across the country.

The National Medical Commission in a notice issued in July last year had said that those who were in the last year of their undergraduate (UG) medicine course and had completed the final year online, on or before June 30, 2022, would be permitted for FMGE and upon qualifying would be completing the Compulsory Rotating Medical Internship (CRMI) for two years.

The Federation of Resident Doctors Association (FORDA) has written a letter to the Health Ministry requesting to intervene as these foreign graduates have been suffering for the past 11 months and has proposed that students who had already passed the FMGE, those who were undergoing their internship, and those who had already completed their internship before the issuance of the July 28th, 2022 NMC notice, should be exempt from its purview as the rest of student including their peers have been.

The FORDA said that the notice, which allowed certain students with attendance deficiencies to appear in the Foreign Medical Graduate Examination (FMGE) 2022, has created confusion and disparity among state medical councils for the students who had already written and passed FMGE prior to issuance of the notice and were already provisionally registered and were about to finish their internship and most of them were issued Permanent Registration by their respective State Medical Councils.

“These doctors’ provisional certificates and hospital placements were based on the previous guidelines, and they should not suffer due to the subsequent changes. As these FMGs cannot start their practice without permanent registration, they have sought urgent help for a resolution to begin without further delay”, said Dr Sarvesh Pandey, National General Secretary, FORDA.