The National Medical Commission (NMC) has withdrawn its recently issued Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) 2024 guidelines after facing backlash.( Circular dated 31/8/2024 )
The guidelines, which included controversial topics such as sodomy and lesbianism as unnatural sexual offences, will be revised and reissued.
The CBME curriculum aims to equip medical students with practical competencies for Primary Healthcare.
What was mentioned in the new curriculum?
The National Medical Commission (NMC) has reintroduced ‘sodomy and lesbianism’ as unnatural sexual offences in the forensic medicine and toxicology curriculum for undergraduate medical students.
It has also brought back topics such as the hymen and its type, and its medico-legal importance besides defining virginity and defloration, legitimacy and its medico-legal importance. These subjects were done away with in 2022 in accordance with a Madras high court directive.
The revised curriculum under forensic medicine and toxicology also includes ‘Describe legal competencies including Bharatiya Nagarika Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS), Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA)’ besides ‘Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (Pocso), Civil and Criminal Cases, Inquest (Police Inquest and Magistrate’s Inquest), cognisable and Non-cognisable offences’.
Two international organisations that work for disability inclusion in medical education and for transgender health, respectively, have threatened to complain to the World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) seeking temporary suspension of the National Medical Commission’s (NMC) recognition by the world body for violation of existing laws to protect the rights of persons with disabilities and LGBTQ+ in the recently released medical education curriculum.
The International Council for Disability Inclusion in Medical Education and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) expressed dismay at “the outright ableist, transphobic new CBME guidelines released by NMC which are against both the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (RPDA), 2016, and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act (TPA), 2019.”
It has also brought back topics such as the hymen and its type, and its medico-legal importance besides defining virginity and defloration, legitimacy and its medico-legal importance. These subjects were done away with in 2022 in accordance with a Madras high court directive.
The amended curriculum has done away with the seven-hour training on disability.
At the end of teaching-learning in forensic medicine and toxicology, the student should be able to understand the medico-legal framework of medical practice, codes of conduct, medical ethics, professional misconduct and medical negligence, conducting medico-legal examination and documentation of various medico- legal cases and understand latest Acts and laws related to medical professional including related court judgements, the NMC said.