No Postponement: AIIMS Patna Holds MBBS Practical Exams as Scheduled

As a result, the 2019 batch of students are appearing in the exams from Monday onwards, officials have informed Hindustan Times.

The institute had conducted the theory examination of the 2019 batch from January 4 and it had continued till January 14. From January 17 to 20, the practical examination in Pathology, Microbiology, Pharmacology, and Forensic Medicine were scheduled to take place.

Taking note of the spike in the COVID cases, the institution had sent a questionnaire to the examinees and sought their response by Sunday evening. The students had to inform in the questionnaire if they were confirmed positive, were experiencing symptoms even though didn't test positive on the test, if they had recovered from COVID-19 or they were healthy.

Also Read: BFUHS releases MBBS First, Second professional Theory Exams Date Sheet, Details

As per the latest media report by Hindustan Times, even though 74 students have informed in the questionnaire that they were healthy, eight candidates have not reportedly responded to it. The daily further adds that until now, a total of 800 employees of the institute have tested positive for COVID-19.

While commenting on the issue, the Director of AIIMS Patna, Dr. Saurabh Varshney, who is also the executive director of AIIMS-Deoghar told HT, "We will conduct our MBBS examination as per schedule, following all Covid-19 appropriate behaviour. We do not want to derail our academic session, which has been affected over the last two years. We are trying to get our students back into the mainstream [of academics]."

"We will divide the examinees into two broad categories. One group will have the ones showing symptoms of Covid-19 and the other will comprise the healthy ones. We will conduct the examination in separate halls, dividing the examinees into smaller groups, with sufficient space between them. We will follow this arrangement at AIIMS Deoghar as well," he added.

Meanwhile, speaking to the daily regarding the matter, Dr. Umesh Kumar Bhadani, dean (academics), AIIMS Patna said, "Some departments like microbiology will conduct the exams in two sessions – morning and afternoon — in order to segregate the healthy and infected examinees. The hall in which the examinees infected by Covid-19 will write their exams will be fumigated every day."

"Our idea of not deferring the exams is also to condition our medicos so that they understand and accept the situation arising out of a pandemic and prepare themselves to serve the society as doctors in event of any medical adversity," he further mentioned.

Meanwhile, Aryabhatta Knowledge University (AKU), the examining body in charge of deciding medical curriculum in the State-run medical colleges of Bihar had deferred all its exams till further notice. As a result, the 1st professional MBBS examination 2021 and the 1st professional Bachelor of Ayurveda Medicine and Surgery 2020 (II), which were set to begin from January 19 have been deferred as well.

It should be noted in this context that it was AIIMS Patna, the same institute which had once decided to promote its students to their next semester without examinations. Medical Dialogues had reported back in 2020 that in the view of the coronavirus outbreak, issuing a notice, the Dean of AIIMS Patna had decided to provisionally promote MBBS students of 8^th semester 2016 batch, 6^th semester 2017 batch, 4^th semester 2018 batch without any exams.

UNI adds that State Health Department sources have revealed that on Sunday, 1,59,659 samples were tested and 5410 of them were found to be Corona positive during the period. According to the sources, maximum number of 1575 positive cases were detected in Patna.