The Chest Research Foundation (CRF), Pune recently conducted ‘1st National Respiratory Meet of HODs of Pulmonary Medicine of Government Medical Colleges in India’ in Pune. The main aim was to bring all HODs of government medical colleges across India together to review, discuss and debate current status of the respiratory post graduate departments in the country with respect to the three major aspects of their functioning: patient care, post graduate education and original research pertaining India.

This was for the first time that all the HODs of 47 Government Medical Colleges, medical colleges and Institutions from 15 states and 2 Union Territories across India came together for a respiratory meet and formed a new paramedical specialty- ‘The respiratory therapists’.

The need for this meeting was felt due to the increasing prevalence of common lungs related problems like asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, tuberculosis, diffuse lung diseases etc. and the poor existing quality of care that is given to the respiratory illnesses despite our country being one of the leading manufacturers of the generic drugs for illnesses related to the lungs.

Several premier institutes including the PGI, Chandigarh, VP Chest Institute in Delhi, CMC Vellore, LRS TB Hospital Delhi, PGIMS Rohtak etc. participated in the meeting.

Dr Nilima Kshirsagar, national chair, Clinical Pharmacology, ICMR Govt. of India, dean, ESI-PGIMSR, MGM Hospital Mumbai and the ex- vice chancellor of the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences while addressing the forum said that time is changing. “The teachers must remain updated with the latest technological advancements and use them to their benefit in developing a healthy student- teacher relationship or mentorship.”

She suggested that to ensure that a medical post graduate student has acquired a certain level of knowledge and skills, we could take example from the west and integrate competency based model that includes explicit expectations & assessment at the end of certain duration into training, and avoid deconstruction of practice.

The forum suggested training and strengthening of primary and secondary health care providers in managing common respiratory problems so that the tertiary care centres can focus on more complicated diseases and most important thing forum stressed that procurement and maintenance of basic essential diagnostic tools at Government Medical Colleges and to train teachers on the use of these equipments. Doctors also agreed that we need to inculcate good communication skills in the medical students and provide structured training for the same.

Regarding upgrading the training of medical students the HODs opined that we should have more focused training at the undergraduate level so that diagnosis and management of common respiratory problems should be done even by a medical graduate.

The HODs opined that both these specialties should get inter departmental four to six months rotational postings. Once we have more and more internal medicine and general practitioners handling the huge burden of common respiratory diseases like asthma, COPD, tuberculosis etc. the two specialties could be merged and pulmonology would then exist as a super-specialty like cardiology, endocrinology, neurology etc. Doctors also urged on regular up-gradation of teachers’ technical as well as training skills to make them better educators.

There is a need for more research in respiratory medicine relevant to our country and HODs felt that training in research methodology should be fortified in all the colleges and there should be an adequate incentives for researchers which is lacking in our country barring certain institutes. Support from the pharma industry was also called for funding of quality research.