The purpose of this bill is to ensure that general and other secondary public hospitals located in Communities surrounding the associate Universities can have the visits of Consultants from Teaching Hospitals and thereby increase Patient-Doctor contact in these hospitals. The bill seeks to achieve this by requiring Teaching Hospitals to specify that Medical Students participate in a Rural Outreach Programme as a requirement for professional qualification.
The immediate impetus for the bill is the realization that Teaching Hospitals usually do not have enough spaces for Student Doctors and other medical personnel from associate Universities. This has resulted in the accumulation of backlog of medical personnel who are on queue to undertake internship, when patients are avoidably dying for a lack of attention by any medical personnel in rural hospitals surrounding the Teaching Hospitals.