20 Nursing Institutes in UP directed to stop admissions at 1500 seats

Lucknow: In a major step down for Nursing education in Uttar Pradesh, several nursing training centres in the State have been directed to stop admission for academic session 2022-23 on the account of faculty shortage.

This is likely to affect admissions at around 1500 nursing seats belonging to 20 nursing training institutes in UP, adds HT.

The issue of severe faculty shortage came to light following a verification exercise conducted by the State Medical Education Department.

As per the rules set by the Indian Nursing Council, the nursing training centres in India are required to gave a 1:10 faculty-student ratio. In order to make sure that these rules are being complied with, UP State Medical Faculty made biometric attendance mandatory for all the faculties and students at the training institutes.

However, UPSMF, which regulates diploma-level nursing and paramedical education in UP, observed that most of the training centres were not sending the biometric attendance, while some were allegedly dealing with some genuine technical issues. Therefore, SMF organised a workshop via video conferencing last month.

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As per the latest media report by Hindustan Times, the SMF also conducted a comprehensive faculty availability verification exercise. Speaking about the same, Alok Kumar, principal secretary, medical education told the daily, "UP State Medical Faculty (UPSMF) conducted a comprehensive faculty availability verification exercise across the training centres. During the first round of telephonic verification, it was found that 161 of the state's nursing training centres (at diploma level) had less than 50% of the mandated faculty-student ratio."

Those training centres received notices and the Faculty also identified 32 centres that did not respond to any communication or initiate the process of sending the biometric attendance as mandated by the State nursing regulator.

Following this, the State carried out a final round of e-verification. In this process the Faculty used the registration documents and Aadhaar cards and verified the identity of each of the tutors via video calls.

Referring to his, Kumar added, "Five centres did not turn up for the e-verification exercise, while six turned up with fraudulent cases, and nine were unable to meet even the 40% benchmark set for verified faculty. The largest number of defaulting centres were found to be at JP Nagar and Mathura, 3 in each district."

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